The Wretched
by Trench Kamen
Summary: Johnny ends up on the Vione, Zaibach's air fortress. Dark, psychologically-based, twisted fic. Escaflowne and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (JTHM) crossover. Yaoi, shounen-ai, slash, hetero. Various pairings. Nonsensical at times, depressing at others.
1. Halo 01: The Return of Nailbunny

Author's notes: 

This is a crossover fanfic concerning _Johnny the Homicidal Maniac_ and the _Vision of Escaflowne_. It is going to be a dark, twisting ride. It is not always going to make sense. I did not write this with the intention of it doing so. This fic takes place after the ending of the JTHM Director's Cut graphic novel and at some yet undetermined point during the Escaflowne storyline, but for both works there will be unavoidable spoilers.

Warnings: This fanfic contains violence, gore, offensive language, possible sexual content (definitely heavily implied). It is a yaoi fanfic, which means concerning romantic relationships between males. There are also flesh-eating penguins. I will indicate chapters containing explicit sexual content (if there ever are any) so that one can read the fic without reading the smut if one wants to do so. The violence and the language are going to be in every chapter. Talk to Nny about his language if you want to.

_Johnny the Homicidal Maniac_ is copyrighted and the brainchild of the brilliant Jhonen Vasquez. _The Vision of Escaflowne_ is copyrighted and conjured by the brilliant Studio Sunrise. I did not create either show or their characters, nor do I claim any of them. None of them want to be claimed anyway. Except maybe Squee. He just needs a hug sometimes.

The naming of the chapters was taken from the method that Nine Inch Nails labels CDs. The title of the fanfic was also taken from a Nine Inch Nails song by the same name. The lyrics to "The Wretched" by NIN form the preface. I did not create them.

Welcome to the late night double feature picture show. Let's go up to the lab and see what's on the slab.

------

_Just a reflection_

_Just a glimpse_

_Just a little reminder_

_Of all the what abouts_

_And all the might have_

_Could have beens_

_Another day_

_Some other way_

_But not another reason to continue_

_And now you're one of us_

_The wretched_

_The hopes and prays_

_The better days_

_The far aways_

_Forget it_

_It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to_

_It didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?_

_It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to_

_It didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?_

_Now you know_

_This is what it feels like_

_Now you know_

_This is what it feels like_

_The clouds will part and the sky cracks open_

_And god himself will reach his fucking arm _

_Through_

_Just to push you down_

_Just to hold you down_

_Stuck in this hole with the shit and the piss_

_And it's hard to believe it could come down to this_

_Back at the beginning_

_Sinking_

_Spinning_

_And in the end_

_We still pretend_

_The time we spend_

_Not knowing when_

_You're finally free_

_And you could be_

But it didn't turn out the way you wanted it do 

_It didn't turn out quite the way that you wanted it_

_Now you know_

_This is what it feels like_

_Now you know _

_This is what it feels like_

_You can try to stop it but it keeps on coming_

_You can try to stop it but…_

--"The Wretched", Nine Inch Nails, _The Fragile_

------------------------------------------------------------------

Halo 01: The Return of Nailbunny

_Dear Die-ary,_

_The passions that drive us should be the ones we respect and admire. To feel contempt for one's motivations is a vulgar thing._

_Too often, it seems, I've succumbed to less than admirable compulsions driven by this furiously reprehensible machine of mine._

_So many things inside that I can do without--desires and urges and whatnot. So extraneous._

_By the time I write in this book again, I hope to be as cold as the moon that lights this page._

---------

Johnny set his Die-ary beside him on the hood of his dilapidated car and allowed his hands to dangle loosely between his legs, shoulders slack, feet resting on top of the bumper. The car was still warm to the touch, radiating dark heat from the rusted engine, from having sputtered and grinded all the way up the mountain path--tailpipe rattling and everything, a stereotypical picture that sent Nny into fits of soliloquy about image and archetype when he was in more manic moods--to a small lookout point with a very evident "NO PARKING" sign. It was Johnny's defiant side, and he was well aware of it. At the moment, he didn't care.

His life had reached an all-time high level of aimlessness.

There was a view of the city below the outcrop, a map of lines and square masses made of pinpricks of gold, red, and blue lights, some pulsating, red lights in lines on the far mountain--the radio towers--grids of moving lines that were cars, people going places. Doing things.

There was one time when Johnny had called it a "beautiful illusion", the very same view, different people in different positions down below, of course; he was aware that people were doing other things at this very moment. The same people he had looked down upon that time had gone on with their lives, the same people, but in different locations. 

"They are going somewhere and I am not. Oh, yes, I am going _somewhere_, but most of them have a vague idea of what exactly their 'somewhere' is, or at least they are under that delusion. Little ants running in loops and lines, around corners and back to start, back and forth in their incessant little lives. It sickens me."

It reminded him of what Devi had said that time: "It's so pretty when you're looking _down_ on it." Away and detached from all of the filth and the slime, just seeing the beautiful lights, pinnacles of human ingenuity. Seeing only what would be the result if humans worked only with efficiency and without all of the junk clogging their minds. Emotions. Urges.

The lights where cold and beautiful. Efficient. 

Johnny propped his elbows on his knees and rested his chin on folded hands. Another hell of a long night with nothing to distract him but his own mind, churning and churning and churning and churning…

Once again, Johnny wanted to shut himself down and clear out his head. The broken thoughts and corrupted delusions, self-loathing and spiraling down, down, down…

"Fuck. Here it goes again. Once again going over the garden of broken delusion in my head, reaping what I sew in the most painful way possible. But unlike those damned farmers that made up that saying I reap again and again. The plants keep growing back and becoming more virulent with every turn of season. Seasons last a short time in my head." He looked up. "I wonder if that is relativity."

A second voice responded next to Johnny's ear: "I believe that theory was originally created for the nucleus of an atom."

Johnny sat up straight. "N-Nailbunny! You're back?!" 

"Yes, well, you're beginning to show some signs of semi-logical thought as of late." The severed bunny head floating next to Johnny's own head looked grim, but then again, his expression never changed. He was logic itself.

Johnny crossed his legs and gripped his ankles. He watched Nailbunny out of the corners of his eyes. "Well, you took your sweet time in coming back. Christ! I've been dealing with shit from the Doughboys and Reverend MEAT and there's been no logical end to my internal conversations to balance me out. I _need_ that logic."

"You don't need to tell me that. And I did aid you at one point, if you do recall."

"Oh yeah…"

Johnny sighed. At least his rambling thoughts could have some form of a response now. It was an internal response, technically, but more and more it seemed that Nailbunny, like Mr. Eff and Psychodoughboy, were becoming self-aware. This was not a good thing.

"Are you splitting from me, Bunny?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Are you becoming just another one of my delusions, some inner demon that plagues me and takes on its own awareness to torment me?"

"Are you asking if I am becoming a separate entity with my own mind?"

"Basically, yeah. But that entails a hell of a lot more shit than you would think. You're my logic, Nailbunny. If you separate from me, I'll have none of that left and only my paranoid delusions to plague me and make up my perception of 'reality' will remain."

"Well, let's look at it this way, Johnny. If I am one of your delusions, I only exist within your mind, within your plane of 'reality'. I would be entirely a product of your own mind, even if you perceive me as an external force. Hence, you would create me. You might not be conscious of it, but my voice would be your voice. Your logical side arguing with yourself."

"I know that. And that is why I am asking if you are a separate entity. Some supernatural floating bunny head that happens to be the head of a rabbit I nailed to my wall."

"Well, if I answer that I am, in fact, separate from you, it may be your own delusion answering. So you would believe that I was a separate entity when, in fact, I am still your own delusion that you fabricate to be a separate, external entity."

"Hmmm."

Johnny looked down at the city. Peripheral vision was starting to hurt his eyes.

"But didn't you leave me before?"

"Once again, it may have been a product of your own delusion. You believed that I left you."

"Right…You know, I've always liked your voice. It's really raspy. Sort of like wind or Darth Vader or something."

Nailbunny's expression did not change, but one could tell that he was taken off guard.

"Darth Vader?"

"Well, not nearly as deep but with that whole rasping breathing thing."

"Yes, I know. I have seen _Star Wars_ with you no less than 57 times."

"You counted?"

"I am logic, am I not? Is not logistics the entailment of concrete operations of a practical nature?"

"You've been at my Jungian psychology books again."

"They're fascinating. And I try to find any sort of feasible answer as to why you are the way you are. You fit the definition of multiple personality disorders and degrees of insanity, but there is no one clean way to pinpoint what makes you tick. You did not have a particularly traumatic childhood, and you do deal with the harassment and general rejection of society but there are multiple individuals who have faced that very same situation and still remain relatively sane. For example, most of them do not go on killing rampages."

"But that's the fuck of it, isn't it, Nailbunny? I can't discern the ones that have hurt me from the decent individuals in society. I have blurry aim. I have reached the point where I hate all of humanity. I desperately search for somebody that would make me happy, somebody that does not send me into fits of projectile vomiting at the sight of them, but I believe that not such a person exists anymore."

"You did at one time. And you almost killed her. That was your fault."

Johnny glared sideways at Nailbunny. "I was SCARED, all right?! You're damn aware of it. There is always a lovely first impression, an illusion, some little saying or common interest that makes you think that you have something in common or that you connect in someway, but disappointment always ensues! The person is NEVER who you thought in the first place. Never! And then you realize even more vividly that you are in fact alone in the world, an island, without a fellow soul that sees things as you do! Somebody that violates your core values in the most sickening ways! Never expect anything but nasty irritation from anybody you didn't create."

"No person is completely understood in this world. There are parts of all of us that nobody will understand or see clearly. And if you create people, do they not take on your values in your desperation to have a friend or a soulmate that is perfect for you? That will not make you hurt or bleed?"

Johnny looked down at his hands, still clenching his ankles. "…yeah. You're right, of course. But isn't that what makes fiction so appealing? That you can interject your own core values into characters to make them your best friends or soulmates? Even if you're different in surface things, even if your souls disagree, they are still your perfect friends?"

"And what about the characters you do not do that to? The ones you leave be and assume would irritate you?"

"They seem so much less irritating behind the fabric of fiction. As if they are more 'real' and 'human' and likable than they would be in real life. The fabric is a safety shield."

"And if you are so delusional that you believe that your current concrete reality is an illusion why do you not treat it with as much favor as you do fiction?"

"…harsh."

"True."

Johnny sighed. "My head fucking hurts."

"Maybe you need an aspirin. Do you have a fever?"

"No. It's this normal tension headache shit. My head gets full of thoughts churning and churning and churning…"

"More analogy of the broken machine ahead?"

"You know damn well it's true. And I've been thinking…"

"This is concerning."

"Shut up. It feels much better to get it off my chest. If all humans are machines, and the machines themselves are corrupt, does being what is technically a 'broken' machine make me the only sane one? The only good one? It seems that the only people to which I have remotely related are on psychological medications or are suicidal or have serious personality disorder problems. They seem like the only sane ones."

"Well, somebody to which you would relate would be insane because you are insane."

"….so, there's no way of knowing if we're all the best form of the machine that the other 'normal' machines try to alter into what they believe is a perfect, balanced machine. It's all percentages and statistics."

Nailbunny sighed. This was going to be a long night. Maybe he could get Johnny off brooding and to go do something…

"Sure. It makes sense. But do remember that most of those people are unhappy, Johnny…"

"Ignorance is bliss! To be aware of one's ignorance is more painful than knowing the TRUTH! The only blissful ones are the ones that believe that the enlightened are insane and that they are the ones knowing all!"

"Well, if what you call 'enlightenment' is horribly paranoid delusions then I am sorry to say that most people are not enlightened, Johnny. And there is something I have been wanting to talk to you about."

"This is concerning."

"It should be. Have you ever noticed that you have the tendency to think that all events occurring around you are, indirectly or not, a result of your presence? That you have some astral power that draws events into place?"

"Well, yeah." Johnny narrowed his eyes. "I'm a waste lock."

"According to whom, Johnny? Another illusionary person?"

"No, Senor Satan. And the theory makes a hell of a lot of sense. All my life I've put up with nothing but shit from people. It's as if I draw unfortunate events into place and to me, and wherever I go they follow. I am fated to bear misfortune."

"You've just had a bad run for it, and you are looking for an excuse to make yourself feel more tragic and interesting--give yourself some validation for all of the horrible things you do to other people."

Johnny glowered.

"And whatever happened to living without emotions or delusions?" Nailbunny continued. "To become as cold as the moon? That would be a lovely change of pace for on--"

Johnny seized the floating decapitated bunny head and violently twisted both hands in opposite directions. The head wrenched in half, the brain half squeezed out through Nailbunny's ears by the force of Johnny's grip. Had there been eyes, they would be artfully popping out as well. 

Nailbunny went silent.

"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!!" Johnny clenched the head by the ears, roaring into its face. The lower half of the head dangled pitifully, held to its top half by only a few strands of tissue. He shook the head. The bottom half swayed dangerously. A few strands snapped. "I CAN'T! I'VE TRIED EVERYTHING, AND NO MATTER WHAT I DO, IT WON'T STOP! I JUST KEEP THINKING AND THINKING AND PROGRAMMING AND PROGRAMMING, CLUTTERING MY HEAD WITH JUNK! FILTH! THERE IS NO WAY TO ESCAPE MYSELF! THAT WOULD BE WHAT IT WOULD TAKE TO STOP THIS SHIT. I AM CORRUPT, DO YOU HEAR ME?! JOHNNY IS CORRUPT! I DID NOT ASK TO BE BORN A FEELING CREATURE, BUT I WAS!"

Johnny chucked the head over the mountain ledge. The head ripped into two halves in midair with the centripetal force and flew off in opposite directions. There was a soft rustle of something hitting leaves.

Johnny watched the head fall, panting, crouched in an aggressive, defensive position. His eyes were wide.

He was scared.

"Christ's sake, he's part of ME, isn't he? Then why the fuck am I so bothered by HIM?"

Johnny slowed his breathing and straightened out his spine. He ran his fingers through his hair. There were still two long, evident antennae of hair that made him look even more like a skinny insect than before, but there was the bristle of regrowing hair across his scalp. The trip to hell had done little for his hairstyle.

"I killed my own voice of reason because he answered what I feared was true about my own delusionary worldview—addressed the fear that I am in fact a pathetic person of no substance looking for some excuse for my antisocial behavior. The same way that people quell their own voices of reason out of guilt. Shit."

There was no voice to answer him back. Johnny sighed. Nailbunny had survived being nailed to the wall and having his head ripped off; he should be back. After all, he was supernatural, was he not? Johnny only hoped that Nailbunny would not abandon him out of contempt. Then again, if Nailbunny was a part of Johnny…

Johnny sighed. He needed a brainfreezy.

Johnny got in the car, pushed the key into the ignition and turned the car on. The engine stalled.

"Oh, don't EVEN start this now, you piece of shit! Come ON!"

Johnny turned the key. The car sputtered. Black smoke poured out of the tailpipe.

"WORK, DAMN YOU!!" Johnny kicked the undercarriage of the engine and turned the key again. "COME ON!"

The engine sputtered, jerked, and settled into a vibrating hum. The digital display in the front control panel of the car read '3:02 AM' in glowing, electric blue light. It was the most luminous thing in the dark car.

"Good."

Johnny put the car in reverse, looked over his shoulder at the adjoining road, saw that he was clear, and backed around onto the mountain highway. He put the car in gear and started driving forward. It was on the downhill incline, much easier on the poor car than the uphill trek.

"Now…the question is, where do I go? I just need to get the hell out of this town. Anywhere but here. I am not under delusion that anyplace else will be any better, but…"

Johnny swerved around a wide corner. His few possessions that he had packed cardboard boxes slammed into the opposite side of the trunk. There was a concerning crash.

"Shit. Damned centripetal force again. I knew I shouldn't have packed the Christmas decorations and the torture instruments in the same box. Next time I'm using bubble wrap. Popping the bubbles is therapeutic anyway."

Johnny looked at his gas meter. He was almost empty.

"Perfect." He thought for a moment. "I guess I can afford one more visit to the 24-7 in my neighborhood for old times' sake. They'd better have the damned machines on this time… Let's have some music."

Johnny turned on the radio. Loud, static-shot rock music started blasting out of the old speakers. 

"OOH! Implement! I love this song!"

The car swerved around and down the mountain into the city, one rattling, speeding blur of offensive, loud music and noise, the only moving thing on the mountain. Johnny left the evergreen area and barreled down the residential streets. The mountain was close to his old neighborhood, so it did not take long to pull in to a parking space at the old 24-7 where he had once killed a clerk on another late-night brainfreezy craving attack.

_"Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA  
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away.  
Any fucking time. Any fucking day.  
Learn to swim, I'll see you down in Arizona bay…"_

"Ooh… Arizona. Maybe I should go to Arizona. But there are so many people from Southern California anyway. I might as well not leave."

Johnny stopped the rattling car and pulled the key out of the ignition. The music stopped in the middle of a stanza. Johnny got out, slammed the door, and ran into the building. A tone responded above his head as he opened the door.

The clerk was asleep at the front counter, a book open next to her, resting on its pages' faces. Johnny ran past her to the brainfreezy machine. Mercifully, it was on this evening. The girl must have forgotten to turn the machine off. Her forgetfulness saved her life.

Johnny set his prize down on the counter. The light from the overhead fluorescent fixtures refracted oddly off of the clear, domed top of the flimsy paper cup. He could see that the book was entitled _Demon Diary_ and was illustrated in that odd Japanese manga style. He had never really gotten into it himself.

"Um…excuse me?"

The clerk remained asleep. Johnny poked her. "You alive?"

The clerk looked up groggily, blinked, rubbed her eyes, sat up, stretched. She looked at the overflowing cup on the counter.

"One extra super size cherry doom brainfreezy? Is this all?"

"Yeah." Johnny did not make eye contact, focusing on her collar. Her nametag read 'Kaity'. There was also a square button on her collar that depicted a manga-styled character pushing his glasses up his nose, smirking. 

"Two ninety-nine." Johnny fished in his pockets and pulled out a wad of two bills and change. He counted out the coins and slid them across the counter.

"Thanks!" Johnny ran out the door. The tone sounded again.

Johnny got back in the car and started the engine, which mercifully idled with the first attempt. The radio started blasting in the middle of a Linkin Plaza song. Things were looking up.

Whistling, Johnny looked over his shoulder, pulled out of the parking lot, and sped off down the street. He took a sip from his brainfreezy with one hand. He was entering his old neighborhood.

"Aah, nostalgia value, even though I was just here two hours ago."

Johnny looked at the clock. It now read '3:35 AM', now definitely the most luminous thing inside the car. The moon had set, and all of the lights were off in the surrounding houses. His neighborhood had been peaceful, quiet, and law-abiding, not beautiful by any means or shiny and happy, but at least quiet at 3:35 AM so long as Johnny was not around to raise hell. 

Johnny stopped in front of his old house and turned off the car. It was silent, dark, like the rest of the neighborhood, foreboding, and still a wreck.

"Why the hell am I here? I don't think I forgot anything."

Johnny looked next door at Squee's house. He had had a final goodbye talk with the little kid just a few hours ago before he had left. He knew well that Squee was terrified of him, and had every right to be, but there was something about the kid that made Johnny pity him. He merely enjoyed his company. There was some sort of comradeship in a penchant for the esoteric or in being an outsider. Besides that, the kid was smart, not in the academic way but in the way that mattered to Johnny. He wasn't a small-minded ass tick.

And there was the fact that Squee reminded Johnny of himself when he was that age.

"Good luck, Squee. Get out of this hellhole all right. Don't become broken and jaded like me. You're a good person. Shit. I never was good with goodbyes."

Johnny turned the key. The car stalled and stopped.

"NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN! WORK!!"

Johnny turned the key several more times. The car refused to start. It sputtered and died.

"Oh, unbelievable!" Johnny squeezed his brainfreezy so tightly that the domed cap popped loose and frozen, sticky drink oozed down his hand. "I end up stuck right where I started! Again! That's all that ever happens! I try to go somewhere and I end up making a circle, I try to change my life and I end up the emotional wreck that I always was! Circles and spirals and spirals and spirals! It never ends! Stuck in this deadlock of life with no way out! No way to the outside world!"

Johnny finally noticed that his hand was getting cold and sticky. He looked at the now half-gone freezy dripping down his arm.

"SHIT!!"

Johnny threw the cup at the windshield. The brainfreezy splattered across the glass and started to ooze down, leaving reddish trails. The cup settled to rest at the junction of the glass and the dashboard.

Johnny crossed his arms and sat back in his seat, seething, gritting his teeth, clenching and unclenching his fists. It was going to be a hell of a long night. Again.

-----------

Squee was having nightmares. Again.

Squee sat up in his bed, screaming. He still felt his own body being ripped in half at the stomach by the pyromaniac albino crazy man. It was not a pleasant feeling.

Squee finally calmed down enough to look for Shmee, his first instinct in these situations. Shmee had fallen onto the floor at some point during the night and was still lying there, on his head, back against the bed. Squee reached down and picked up his bear, then clenched him to his chest.

"I had a dream, Shmee."

"What else is new?"

Squee gulped. This was one of the times when he wondered if his bear's voice was the voice of some insane demon from the voids of hell. Something about the bear's tone clearly said that he was not in the mood to be comforting. A teddy bear that was dark enough to not want to be comforting was not what Squee wanted in his arms at the moment. 

Pushed against his stomach where he had just been ripped…

Squee shuddered and buried his face against the top of Shmee's head. The brown fur smelled like Lysol.

"Shmee, there was an pyromaniac albino crazy man and a demon with wings and a metal claw and the crazy neighbor man was there and there was a big red robot that was shooting fire and claws and the place was on fire and Squee got ripped in half and he turned into lava and he said 'I am going to another world' or something and the flesh eating demons from the last few nights dreams were back and the pyro albino crazy man slapped me and the demon sucked out all my blood and replaced it with something I don't want to know what it is and the pyro albino crazy man was a child that was kidnapped and they did horrible experiments on him and made him crazy and the crazy neighbor man was there…"

"It was probably a premonition dream."

"A what?"

"A dream of what is to come. It's sort of like what the people on the psychic hotline do. Or like fortune cookies. Now go back to sleep."

Squee clutched Shmee closer and looked out his window at the dark street below. "Does that mean that the demon is going to come and do horrible things to Squee in a lab with test tubes make Squee crazy like the crazy neighbor man? Squee…"

The crazy neighbor man's car was parked outside of the next-door house.

"Squee~~!!"

"He probably will if you don't lie down and be quiet like a good boy."

"Why is the crazy neighbor man back? He said he was leaving."

"He probably changed his mind. Now let's get some sleep."

Squee thought for a moment, lowering his chin so that it touched his throat, clutching Shmee, trying to make himself feel more secure. He was failing miserably.

"Are you sure it's a pre…future dream?"

"Premonition, and no. It might be the nightmare world trying to merge into this world through the medium of your head."

Squee made a small noise.

Something very unexpected happened, not unexpected because it was odd, for odd things happened all the time around Squee, but unexpected because it was not horrific or grotesque at first glance: a high-powered beam of light shot down from heaven and engulfed the crazy neighbor man's car.

For some reason, that scared Squee more than any bone-marrow sucking demon hellspawn monster from the netherworld.

"SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!"

-----

"I go in circles and I go nowhere. Just like one of those rats on a wheel. Expending so much energy to go anywhere, to get out of a cage, and yet I stay in the same place: inside the cage. I want to transcend. I want the hell out of this place."

Johnny had his knees drawn up to his chest, arms draped over the top of them. He was staring straight ahead. The brainfreezy had long since pooled at the junction of the dashboard and the windshield, running down through slits in the dashboard. There were red streaks across the glass.

He was really starting to miss Nailbunny.

"Just get me out of here. Where there are people I would like. Where there is just one person that would understand me. One person I don't want to kill. One reason to live."

Johnny looked sideways out the window. "Maybe I should go attack a cheerleader slumber party…"

White light blasted around the car. Every pore, every window in the car was filled with light. Johnny shielded his eyes and blinked.

"What the FUCK?!"

The loose rocks around the car began to levitate slightly. The car moved off the ground a little, hovering, repelled on a cap of air with the same effect of pushing the congruent sides of two magnets together. It was the same feeling, anyway. 

The car was being sucked up.

Johnny took a moment to register this information.

"Oh. Man."

Johnny looked out the window. He could see nothing beyond the glare of the light. The ground below was clearly visible, shielded from the light by the car. The rocks and gravel were still hovering.

The car zoomed up.

Johnny's eyes widened. He clenched the steering wheel.

The car reached a peak and hovered for a split second, without gravity or force. The car dropped.

Johnny's stomach followed a few seconds after.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!"

As they were, Johnny's knuckles turned white with the force of clenching the wheel. The car rattled dangerously the entire way down…down…

SMASH.

The car slammed ground with a resounding jerk, bounced on its wheels several inches in the air and then bounced once more back to the ground. Johnny smashed his head into the dashboard. Several cases of metal instruments of various use crashed in the trunk. The empty brainfreezy cup flew off the dashboard and into the backseat; the pool of freezy left on the dashboard splattered across the windshield and Johnny.

One thing was for sure: the car was not driving anywhere anytime soon.

Johnny kept his shoulders drawn up to his ears, cringing, eyes screwed shut. He half expected something else to smash into the car.

It remained silent for a few moments. Johnny groaned and touched his forehead. The skin was tacky with blood, a few strands of hair plastered down with it. He followed the blood with his fingertips until he felt a wound where his forehead had hit the dashboard.

"Oww. Shit."

Of all of the things he had packed, he forgot bandages. Well, there was the fact that he had none in the first place. It was one reason he was always making midnight trips to Squee's house. Besides, he never got injured in any of his escapades anyway. The cause of injury was always something mundane, like a Spaghettios can. 

Or having his car sucked up hundreds of feet into the air and then dropped suddenly by a beam of light.

Johnny looked up slowly, still holding his wound. He did not like what he saw.

In the first place, the moonlight was pouring strongly through the stained windshield, casting light onto the derelict upholstery and dashboard. Johnny shielded his eyes with his unoccupied hand. He could have sworn that the moon had already set a while ago.

And, in the second place, superimposed over the moon was a second translucent disc. Another moon.

Johnny narrowed his eyes. The other cosmic body looked exactly like Earth. Blue ocean, dark land, swirling white clouds. 

"Clone Earth? Second Earth? Am I still on Earth at all?" Johnny lowered his eyes to the surrounding landscape to see if there were red hills and Martians waiting with anal probes. He saw the fringe of a forest populated by deciduous trees. His car was resting on a brilliantly green meadow, shining in the moonlight. 

It was very beautiful, but it was definitely not Southern California. 

"Ooooh… What's this?"

Johnny opened his door and stepped out of the car. A cool, dry breeze ruffled his hair, cold across his thinly covered scalp and wound. It felt as if the blood on his forehead was having the moisture sucked out of it.

"Where the hell am I?" Johnny pivoted on his heels and looked in the opposite direction. There was the silhouette of a log fortress on a low rise in the land a distance away, where the grass gave way to dirt. He could see people patrolling the ramparts, some collecting around towers with pennants on the flagpoles.

"Huh…it looks like the laser tag place at Fun-a-Ride or one of those Renaissance fair things. Maybe they do historical reenactments or something." Johnny's eyebrows arched happily. "Or…OOH. I remember that one place where you could eat stew and watch knights go at it with poles. But it wasn't that fun because it was all show and playacting. No real violence. Maybe they have a phone."

Johnny opened the trunk of his car and started to fish around in the boxes. Many of them had come open and spilled their subversive contents across the carpeted floor. He found his flattened, empty backpack and opened it, stiffening out the bottom and setting it on the ground. He started to pile things in. He probably was not coming back to the car for a while.

Besides, his doors did not lock. They hadn't locked for years. He had never bothered to get the locks fixed.

CD player he set on top of the car…CD wallet 1…CD wallet 2…Die-ary and a pen, AA batteries, notebooks of torture designs, art sketchbook, graphite pencils, pencil sharpener, knife sharpener, erasers, change of clothes, toothbrush, hairbrush, toothpaste, antiperspirant, cologne, black eyeshadow and eyeliner for bad days, black gloves, favorite shirt with the ever-changing front and back, dental floss, rusty hooks, several novels and books of poetry, notebook of half-finished Happy Noodle Boy comics…

"Too bad I can't fit the chainsaw…" Johnny found his old copy of a guide to Chinese torture methods and pressure points and shoved it in the bag. "Wherever this is, as long as there are people here, I know that it is going to be hell. I am not so disillusioned that I think that just because of a location change people are going to be any different. Humanity does not change. It's disgusting wherever one goes. I hope Nailbunny can find me here…and that Reverend MEAT or the Doughboys can't…"

Johnny found his favorite pair of machetes and shoved them into his belt. He made one final inventory of the trunk and his backpack, decided that he had everything he needed, and slammed the lid of the trunk shut. The abused car bounced with the force.

"Poor thing…you've had a rough night." Johnny swung his backpack onto his shoulders. The contents clanked. He took his CD player off of the top of the car and placed the headphones on his ears. "Well…THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR BREAKING DOWN, ISN'T IT?! STUPID USELESS PIECE OF SHIT!"

Johnny kicked the bumper with a steel-toed boot. The bumper fell off.

"TRYING TO GET ME DOWN LIKE THE WHOLE REST OF THE WORLD, TRYING TO OPPRESS ME IN THAT HELLHOLE OF A PLACE! WELL, YOU KNOW WHAT?! FUCK YOU! I'M GOING!"

The car did not answer. Johnny glowered at it a while longer and pressed play on his CD player. Bach's _Toccata and Fugue_ blasted around his ears.

He did not notice what a racket he was creating in the silent forest.

Johnny turned on his heels and started walking toward the fortress in the distance, whistling. 

----

The lyrics Nny were singing were from the song _Aenima_ by Tool. Not my creation.


	2. Halo 02: Illusion of Paradox

Halo 02: Illusion of Paradox

Garufo watched his fellow sorcerers file into the spacious meeting room, shuffling over the stone floor to seat themselves around a circular table. As was custom in the capitol the four head sorcerers were given absolute freedom to move about as they pleased and to assemble without moderation from government officials, something that Garufo knew well not to take for granted. As an apprentice microphones and blurry LCD cameras always monitored his interactions with other students outside of formal classes. Ironically, the students were given lessons and descriptions of propaganda and totalitarianism, but always with distant Mystic Moon governments as the examples. 

"Feed the populace with facts until they feel stuffed, until they feel satisfied, and they will not question the knowledge they are given, thinking it their own logic. They will not see the fault right under their noses," Foruma had told him when he was first initiated into the higher ranks of the Sorcerers. That was the day a few years ago that a young prodigy no less than twenty-five years Garufo's junior quit the organization and went off to be an independent. At first Garufo thought it was the kid's loss and his lucky break, but more and more he began to wonder if that, as well, was a paradoxical analysis.

"The indoctrination is so complete and subtle," Garufo had replied. "Stroke the pride of that which the students value the most, and validate that about which they are most insecure. Make them feel that they are enlightened."

"It feels dirty, doesn't it?" Foruma had stared into Garufo's eyes the entire time. "Yes, it is manipulation, but in the end it will help us to achieve our new world. Emperor Dornkirk's new world. Sacrifices must be made."

Garufo was beginning to wonder if it was going to be worth it in the long run.

Garufo realized that Foruma was talking. He looked up from his thoughts and returned to the present. The old man had his fingers interlocked and resting over his lips, narrowing his eyes across the table. The blue flame on the wall guttered dangerously low.

"The attack on Fanelia is scheduled to commence this evening. You have all been sent the information on the specifics." Foruma removed his glasses and cleared off the lenses with the hem of his robe. "We are all in understanding about its significance?"

The Sorcerers mumbled agreement. Foruma replaced his glasses over his eyes.

"Paruchi, read your report."

The youngest of the Sorcerers, to say that he appeared to be in his thirties, glanced down at the paper in front of him. "At approximately o-four-hundred hours fourteen minutes today a concentrated particle beam from the Mystic Moon made contact with Gaea around the Valley of the Dragons in the Fanelia area. This is in addition to the one that made contact in the same area at approximately twenty-one hundred hours yesterday."

"You're not serious," Kuaru muttered.

"The data is unmistakable. Several lower-level sorcerers and apprentices on other outposts reported the very same data." 

_So, there is something happening on the Mystic Moon this evening._ Garufo looked at Paruchi.  _This might be something good._

"This is all the information we have?"

Paruchi nodded to Foruma. "We are planning upon initiating a thorough search of the area. The Vione is already in the vicinity."

"Absolutely not," Kuaru hissed.  "We are not getting that kid involved in this."

"I do not relish the thought of involving Folken any more than you do, Kurau, but he would have noticed such a phenomenon had it occurred right under his nose." Foruma stared levelly at Kuaru over his folded hands. "We would lose his trust not to involve him."

"To hell with his trust. We don't need that kid."

"We are perfectly capable of handling this operation without him," Paruchi added. "I am tired of crawling to him for help whenever—"

"We never crawl to anybody for help, much less a traitor to our organization." Foruma moved his gaze to Paruchi. Paruchi faltered slightly. "I do not deny that Folken has his uses. Nor do I deny that he is difficult to manipulate. His trust is worthy of keeping at the moment."

"Well, Emperor Dornkirk is doing a good job of manipulating the kid at the moment."

"I said difficult, not impossible."

"Let's get a search organized immediately." Kuaru looked around the table. Reading a Sorcerer's facial expressions was like reading a rock, but they were all well versed in the art. "We must beat that kid to the source of information this time. Besides, he's busy organizing the attack anyway. He won't have time to check anything until tomorrow."

_Gentlemen, please._ Garufo looked around the table. _You might as well just paste signs to your foreheads that say 'I'm insecure and threatened by a barely post-adolescent kid with serious psychological problems.'_

"I am in favor of searching for information. We can take a convoy to the two sites and be there in a few hours."

Foruma nodded to Garufo. "Action, not arguing. Words do nothing, gentlemen. The sun is rising. We will split into two groups and collect any data that can be taken from the sites. Are we in agreement?"

The Sorcerers nodded. Foruma pushed his glasses up his nose and stood.

"Good. Let us arrange for convoys."

-----------------------

"Where the fuck am I? Ow, this is heavy…"

Johnny shrugged off his backpack and sat down on a rock beside the path. His earphones were dangling around his neck, currently silent. The fortress was much further away than it had looked at first analysis. For a straight-line path it was not as far, but there was a deep valley surrounding the landmass that added a great deal more walking distance.

A hang-glider would have come in handy.

Johnny sighed. The sun had begun to rise not long ago, and already the dew was thawing from the surrounding shrubbery. The sky was vivid, glowing yellow on the horizon, fading to blue. _That must be east, assuming that this is in fact Earth or a planet with the same direction of spin. The sun seems to be the same distance from the planet. It's not freezing or blazing or anything. Shit. This is confusing. Where the hell is Nailbunny?_

Johnny looked around. Forest behind him, forest on the other side of the road, still a hell of a way to go to the fortress thing on the landrise. He sighed.

"Maybe there's a quicker route if I double back."

Johnny looked back up the road. There was a smudge of a dust cloud rising on the curve of the road.

"Huh? Somebody coming?"

Johnny tilted his head toward the cloud. After a few minutes he could make out the sound of horses' hooves and somebody singing a solo, wavering song in a foreign language. At least he knew there were people on the cart.

"It'll do…"

----------------------

Hitomi sunk lower into her windbreaker and half-listened to Ruhm's song. He had been singing for several straight hours now. She was beginning to wonder if beast-men had incredible stamina for talking and singing that humans could never possess—not only for that, but for walking as well. The several escort beast-men walking alongside the cart had not stopped for break or water the entire night.

_Night… _It reminded her of a point of confusion. Hitomi looked at the clock on her pocket bell. The clock read 00:04 hours, but the sun was just rising. It had been dark when she left earth and dark when she crashed onto Gaea, but there were obvious differences in time zones. Unless midnight here meant sunrise or something. It would not surprise her in the least bit. This place was weird.

She was wondering how to ask if this place had twenty-four hour days or seven days in a week when Ruhm stopped singing. Van sat up from where he had been slumping in the hay, brooding about something Hitomi did not bother to question.

"What? Something wrong?"

Ruhm moved the stalk between his lips with his tongue thoughtfully. "There's somebody waiting on the side of the road."

"Huh?" Van pushed his upper body over the wagon side and looked up the road. Hitomi sat up and brushed the straw out of her hair.

"What is it, Van?"

Hitomi looked around Van's shoulder. There was indeed a person standing a few hundred meters up the dirt road, waving energetically. He appeared to have a backpack.

"One of your friends?"

"Never seen him before…" Van looked at Ruhm. "One of your friends?"

Ruhm shook his head. "He looks like a lost traveler. Let's give him a ride to the city, at least. We can further clear up his business here once we've all had a little food to put in our bellies. My stomach is protesting neglect."

_Mine too…_ Hitomi folded her arms on the edge of the wagon wall and rested her head on the cradle as the wagon started to move again, rocking, making her chin knock against her arms rhythmically. It felt oddly pleasant.

_ I hope these people at least eat normal food. I'm not in the mood to be adventuresome with foods right now. I just want a bed and a bath…and some good food._ She blew a piece of straw away that was threatening to go up her nose. _Maybe they have good stews. They seem European to me…_

"Whoa," Ruhm commanded. The wagon jolted to a stop. Hitomi bumped her nose against her arm.

"Hello there," Ruhm said. "What is your business here?"

Hitomi looked up, rubbing her nose. The boy standing on the side of the path was deathly pale, skinny as a toothpick, and grinning manically. _Good god. He makes Van look well fed._

The boy and Ruhm started a conversation. Hitomi rested her cheek against her arms, watching the boy. The first thing that came to mind was that he looked utterly psychotic, although she could not pinpoint why. He had two oddly styled antennae of hair that stuck out with what Hitomi assumed was a liberal amount of gel and what looked like a bad shave across the rest of his scalp that was beginning to grow back. His clothes were black. He was wearing a pair of knee-high leather combat boots that had enough buckles on them to supply a uniform shop for a day. His eyes were so dark that she was sure that he was wearing eyeliner and mascara.

_It must be that gothic thing…_ Hitomi continued to watch the boy talk, concentrating on his face. The boy looked devious, for one thing. She wouldn't trust him any further than she could pick up the entire cart and throw it. 

The boy was telling a story with generous hand motions, staring straight at Ruhm the entire time. Hitomi noticed that in one hand he was holding disc-shaped object connected to his ears by a black chord. 

She blinked. That was a CD player.

"H-Hey!" Hitomi sat up. "Are you from Earth?"

"Huh?" said Van.

The boy stopped talking to Ruhm and looked at Hitomi. He arched his eyebrow to the point that the same eye bugged out to single Hitomi for scrutiny. Hitomi swallowed.

"Yeah…" The boy turned his entire body around and placed his chin in his hand. He furrowed his eyebrows. "So you're from Earth as well, and you're stuck in this hellhole of a medieval fantasyland as well, are you?"

"Yeah!"

"Wait a minute." Van looked at Hitomi. "'Earth'?"

"It's the Mystic Moon," she said quickly. She turned back to the boy. "I'm Kanzaki Hitomi."

"Well…" The boy bowed. "I am Johnny C. Seeing as we are from the same planet and are compatriots in this strange world and all, you may call me 'Nny'."

"Hi…"

"So…" Johnny looked back at Ruhm. _He narrows his eyes when he smiles,_ Hitomi thought. _As if he's trying to balance out that show of kindness with deviation. It's sort of sad…_

Ruhm nodded to the back of the cart. "Get in, lad. We'll get you fed and washed up."

Johnny bowed once again. "Thank you."

Hitomi sighed and looked down her nose at the ground. She saw the top of Johnny's head move past, oddly like an insect sensing its path with its antennae. _Like a praying mantis…_ She buried her head in her arms. _I have a bad feeling about this…_

The cart dipped with slight added weight and then righted itself. Hitomi heard footsteps across the swept planks and then felt weight settle itself to her right on the hay. There was a whiplash and the cart lurched into a roll again. 

Ruhm started a new song.

"So…"

Hitomi looked up. Johnny was looking at her. "Where exactly on Earth are you from?"

"Kamakura, Japan."

"Hmm. Well, I'm from America. Your English is perfect."

Hitomi blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Your English." Johnny pulled his CD wallet out of his backpack, opened it, and laid it across his lap. He started flipping through the pages. "You are very skilled. Or are you living in Japan for military or something?"

"I…don't speak English. Wait a minute…" Hitomi furrowed her eyebrows. "I'm speaking Japanese right now. I hear you and Van speaking perfect Japanese."

Van flatly stared at Hitomi. He had just looked ragged and tired before. Now he looked ragged and confused.

"What are you talking about? I am speaking Standard New Gaean. As are both of you."

"And I speak and hear English." Johnny stopped on a page and replaced the CD in his player for a new one. "This is a world in which we have the gift of tongues. The ability to understand each other, be it through some subconscious psychic link of communication or something. I don't know the specifics. Oooh." He looked up. "Maybe somebody installed interpreter chips into our brains why we slept! The beam of light must have been a dream."

Van and Hitomi stared at each other. Johnny did not notice.

"And the scientists have put us into this experimentation world where they monitor our every word with cameras and microphones! Not only do they test their chips, but they do psychological endurance tests! Will we go crazy? Will we believe that we are on an alien planet?" Johnny grabbed Van's collar and shook him. "ARE YOU REALLY PARANOID IF THEY ARE AFTER YOU?!"

"HEY!" Van ripped Johnny's hands off of his shirt and threw Johnny back across the cart. "What the hell are you talking about? You're insane… Jeez…"

Van settled in his little corner in the straw. Hitomi looked from him to Johnny, the latter of whom was sitting up and picking straw out of his hair. Johnny was several inches taller than Van, but Van was obviously much stronger. _He really is underfed. I wonder if he is anorexic or something…_

"Am I?" Johnny mumbled. "Are you sure I'm not the only sane one?"

"Whatever," Van muttered back.

Hitomi watched Van for a while and then turned her attention to Johnny. The American was staring at Van, thinking hard about something. The wheels were turning upstairs, and it had already been proven that quite a few of those screws holding the proverbial wheels were loose. The question was a matter of how many.

Hitomi sighed and burrowed back into her windbreaker. 

She noticed that Johnny had a pair of lethal-looking knives thrust into his belt.

_Oh boy…_

--------------------

_He's not fucking serious._

Dilandau watched the horizon line rise perpendicularly to his line of sight as he guided his Alseides to land on the plains. The sunrise was beautiful this morning. Disgustingly beautiful. _All we need are for the birds to sing and this will be one fucking perfect picture. I think I'm gonna be sick. Place needs a blowtorch…_

The Alseides touched down in the clearing. Johnny's car was the only other object on the vast expanse of grass. Dilandau tilted his head. 

"Hm." 

So, Folken hadn't lost his mind completely when he said they would find something on the Fanelian plain. It didn't change the fact that Dilandau had been ordered out to complete menial cleanup work.

_I'm elite,_ he thought vehemently. _What the hell does the damned Strategos think he's playing at, anyway? This is junk for common soldiers to handle. I have an attack to organize, damn it._

Dilandau heard the hiss of gears switching guymelef from flight to ground mode behind him. _Finally. Took you two long enough…_

Two weights hit the ground behind Dilandau's Alseides. Dilandau growled and flipped the intercom switch on the control panel. _Let's just get this over with…_

"Gatti, Migel, you see it?"

There was a crackle of static. Dilandau growled and whacked the side of his Alseides. The metal arc encasing his hand clanged against the casing of the cockpit. _What a fucking waste of my time…_

"Yes, lord," two voices answered over the intercom.

"Good. Get it and let's get out of here."

The intercom crackled again. Dilandau hissed. That frequency of static was from a distance—

"What do you see, Dilandau?"

_The bastard's monitoring my INTERCOM?! _

Dilandau made whining noises in the back of his throat with the effort of not screaming. He swallowed and cleared his throat.

"I see a machine of some sort," he growled through his teeth. _This is bullshit._ "I'm sending you the coordinates. Come get it yourself. And get your fu—cursed bugs out of my Alseides."

"I am otherwise occupied."

_Doing what? Shoving your claws up your ass? _"I also have prior engagements, Strategos."

"None of which I am aware." 

Dilandau thought of how nice it would be to ram his sword into Folken's back until the tip cleared out his chest with his impaled heart. Still beating. That would be nice.

"…Therefore, I assume that you are unoccupied at the moment. Bring the machine back to the Vione and send the coordinates you promised."

_Break his ribcage and hope the splinters get his organs. I wish being exposed to the sunlight would make his heart catch fire and turn to ashes. Maybe if I twist my sword the right way I can impale his lungs as well…_

"Dilandau, are you listening to me?"

_Fuck off. _"Yes, Strategos."

"Then you are clear on my orders?"

_It would be so easy to make it look like an accident. Or play it off on some poor common solider…_ "…yes…" he muttered halfheartedly.

"Good. I expect you back soon."

The static crackled off. Before the last snap died off Dilandau roared and punched the intercom panel into the Alseides wall. The wires crackled and showered small, showy but insubstantial flurries of sparks. The arm sheath worked like a brass knuckle in these situations, to his advantage. The feeling of something crumpling and breaking under his touch was therapeutic. Better that than somebody's skull. It would get him into trouble he did not want to deal with. The army was liberal with its red tape.

Dilandau twitched. The intercom speaker was now dangling by a few chords attached to its back. Whatever. It would still work. He had done this no less than five times in the past month alone. _Easy to fix._ He sometimes suspected that the new unbreakable design for the intercoms had been inspired by his outbursts alone.

Dilandau sighed and pulled his arms out of their sheathes. He pulled his coronet off with both hands and brushed his hair off of his face. The damn thing started to stick to his forehead and trap hair when he was excited.

"Um…Sir?"

He had forgotten to switch the intercom off. Dilandau closed his eyes and rubbed his hand across his forehead. The friction of the leather and skin was pleasant.

"What, Gatti?"

"Should we start to move the wreckage?"

"Yeah. Get to it. Make it snappy. I want out of here as soon as possible."

"Yes, Sir."

The two Alseides behind Dilandau walked forward from either side, moving into Dilandau's line of vision through the view-grille. Dilandau snorted and pushed his coronet back onto his forehead. This was going to be a first-class pain.

"Well, don't just stand there. Move the damn wreck. And get it back in one piece. This is menial soldiers' work. Don't embarrass me."

_It would serve Folken right if I brought this thing back after I let my boys have a go at it with their crima claws._ Dilandau watched Gatti's and Migel's melefs clumsily stoop down to lift the wreck between them. The Alseides units were not built for this sort of work. 

"Well, move it along! We don't have all day!"

"Should we examine the wreck first, Sir?" Migel asked.

"No. Just move the damn thing. Hurry it up."

-----------------

Folken switched off the intercom and pulled his left hand back into his cloak. There was something oddly numbing about using his living hand to perform the most basic of tasks. Reach outside some safety cloak and touch the outside world. 

_Safety cloak._ He looked down at his robe. _Security blanket. Why I still wear this thing in the first place. In some pathetic attempt to make myself feel more secure with myself or present an image. I don't even know anymore._

Folken walked to the apex of the bridge and looked down at the levels of control. The sun was shining directly into the windows around the Vione's control deck. The stone room was glaring with sunlight. A lovely image of paradox.

He had been unable to sleep for forty-eight hours. The effects were badly starting to manifest themselves in his thought processes. _It's not like I haven't done this before many times,_ he thought. _School to work, days without sleep. Stupor and surrealism. Freedom from dreams. Nightmares._

Insomnia was becoming an incessant problem. Folken had plenty of time to sleep in the past few days, but his mind had refused to shut itself off. Always just beyond the breach of sleep, his thoughts churned. Never. Stopping.

"Van…"

"Lord Folken?"

Folken blinked and turned his head slowly toward the messenger standing next to him. The beautiful, immaculate front he had perfected over the past ten years had never cracked in front of anybody. It was automatic. He no longer noticed its presence. 

Thoughts and reality were detached.

"This just came from the capitol." The messenger offered a paper bag with a cylinder-shaped bulge at the bottom. Folken grasped the bag in his claw and nodded to the messenger. The messenger walked away as quickly as decorum would allow.__

_Still frightened,_ he thought with some amusement. _I wonder if they still believe that I drink blood out of skulls._

Folken opened the bag, knowing fully well what was in it before he tipped a glass bottle filled with white pills into his left hand. The glass was cold, smooth; the pills clicked and clanked against each other and the bottle.__

_They were kind enough to remember to send my medication. Bastards._

Folken turned the cylinder over in his hand. The pills tumbled against one another and cascaded over slopes formed with each rotation of the glass. Beautiful. __

_A lovely image of paradox._

Folken clasped the glass in his palm and walked briskly off of the observation deck, down the stairs, past several people that suddenly pretended to be busy and breathed a sigh of relief as he passed without comment, and out of the sunlit room. The pills clanked and tumbled over each other intermittently. The slight vibrations of contact could be felt through the glass. It was easy. Every fiber in Folken's hand was concentrating on the glass, extending itself to the pills. 

The glass began to grow warm.

Folken walked into the deepest sectors of the Vione's energist heating chambers, past several converters and heaters of elaborate, wrought iron design, and stopped at the central furnace. The furnace was a spheroid shape, suspended by a wrought iron arm that ran along the ceiling like a single rib before it dropped. It was fed by hundreds of huge tubes connecting to all of the converters in the chamber. 

The heat was sweltering in there. The furnaces were heated to levels of white-hot flame. The light was blue, seeming almost cold in gestalt, but was in fact hotter than a room that glowed red. 

Another illusion of paradox.

Folken found a pair of tongs in a holder and used them to twist the latch on the furnace door. The door creaked open with a gust of scalding air. Folken backed up slightly and stared into the white flames. The light cast sharp shadows up the angles and planes of his face.

A long time passed.

Folken pitched the bottle into the furnace. 

The bottle smashed into the basin of the spheroid contraption. 

Folken stared into the fire a while longer before closing the hatch and swooping back up the stairs into the cold hallway. Two worlds of blue light merged into one another, contrasts of temperature, scalding and freezing.

_Emotion. Allegory. Irony._

_…I wish that I could shut myself off and repair everything…_


	3. Halo 03: Inner Monologues of Depressed Y...

**Halo 03: Inner Monologue(s) of Depressed Youth(s)**

It turned out that the people of the fortress--which was, in fact, a walled village named "Fanelia" that reminded Johnny of the adobe sky city he saw once in New Mexico, but on some sort of medieval high--seemed very much like a collective for tradition-oriented, anal-retentive knights that could be found quoting the codes of chivalry and tying scarves to their helms. 

They were the Earth equivalent of a pack of soccer moms and Southern Baptist dads, but with badass swords and armor. In short, they were people with which Johnny would not get along for long, nor would they relish him after learning more about his personality. 

_But at least they're being hospitable_, he thought, curled up on the windowsill and watching the people mill about below. His chin was resting on his folded arms.  _It helps that little twerp is actually prince of this fucking place. Contacts in high places. I guess that they mean well, so long as you're a perfect little member of their society, or are willing to reform into one anyway. Jesus fucking Christ. Is that what they want to do with me? Mold me into one of them? Fuck, there goes that paranoia shit again. Where the hell is Nailbunny?_

_Hmmm… 'reform', 'conform', which is a better word for this situation?_ Johnny burrowed down into his arms and narrowed his eyes. Hospitable though they were, they had searched Johnny's bag and had confiscated his weapons, pointless measures for security. People were easily killed with plastic sporks and curtain rods. If it gave the people some piece of mind, so much the better for them. Somebody would have to ask them once again how secure they felt when they were all lying face-down in pools of their own blood with curtain rods shoved through their eye sockets.

_And I'm actually hungry for once. My agenda of living without succumbing to needs and desires is going straight into the fucking ground with all of my other dreams. The vicious circle never ends. It never. Fucking. Ends--_

A girl swung down into the window frame and dangled upside-down in front of Johnny's face. Johnny blinked. She appeared to be very much human in body shape and facial structure, but she also had large, catlike ears, claws, and what Johnny was sure was a tail, from what he could see. She also had bubblegum-pink hair. 

And on second thought, her face looked pretty feline as well--

The cat blinked, swung into the room--landing neatly on her feet--and turned to face Johnny. Her tail bristled and stood up as she started to pace in circles around Nny, hands folded behind her back.

She did not look amused.

_I already dislike this thing…_

"And who are you?" the cat-girl asked in high-pitched, singsong tones.

Johnny waited for a moment. "…Johnny," he said after some careful thought. "Johnny C., at your service, but you may call me 'Nny' for short."

Johnny bowed elegantly. The cat-girl straightened. She looked even more displeased than she was before.

"See? What kind of a name is 'See'? Hey!" The girl circled around Johnny, once again scrutinizing every detail of his body. "What are you wearing? I've never seen clothes like this before." She clicked one of her claws against a buckle on Johnny's boot. "They're weird."

_At least she didn't say 'wacky'. It just saved her fucking life._

"Yeah, sure. Um, listen…" Johnny sat down on the twin bed against the wall that was covered with an elaborately-woven, rough blanket that even more strongly enhanced the adobe gestalt. He bounced a little. The mattress felt like it was filled with straw. 

He narrowed his eyes at the cat-girl.

"I'm not in a great mood right now, and since you're like, what -- ten? -- I am going to be nice and allow you to walk out of here with all of your claws still inside your fingers. Or whatever you call them on a cat. Anyway, you've probably been programmed by the fucks that run this place. Can't blame kids for that until they get a little older, like that prick of a prince. So get out of here. Leave me to my incessant brooding and boughts of self-loathing."

The cat-girl's tail bristled twice as high as it was already standing. _All right, hunch shoulders, clench claws, bar fangs, growl. Such a perfect picture of pointless anger. Such excess._

"I'm thirteen! And--" She snarled and crouched lower. "--what did you call my Van-sama?!"

Johnny held out his hands and leaned forward, a practiced pose that, in the days before most of his hair had been scorched off by the return fires of hell, would have allowed his hair to shadow his eyes. "A prick, a closed-minded prick with a rather mundane mind. Now, if you will excuse me I am going to go far, far away from you before I change my mind about letting you live."

Johnny dropped his hands and began to stand. The cat-girl screamed and attacked his legs. 

"HEY! OW! SHIT!"

Johnny untangled himself from the girls' claws and jumped over her, knocking open the loosely-bolted door in the process of landing in the hallway and thanking whatever deity happened to take interest in him -- who also made his life a hell -- for at least giving him height as an advantage and some semblance of agility. He bolted down the hall. A second later, the cat-girl skidded into the hallway and gave chase.

_Holy mother fucking Christ, what the hell is this?_ He turned a corner and ran past several open practice rooms, empty at the moment. _There is a half-cat little girl chasing me, I'm stuck in fucking la-la land with Monty Python's reject groupies, and even with all of that shit I never get a break from small-minded rectal tics. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. NEVER. Bloody hell, I'm not even on Earth and still I have to put up with this waste lock shit. What the hell is a "sama"?_

The cat-girl's claws were scraping across the floor rhythmically with her scampering, and getting closer. Johnny could hear the girl panting and making small noises of anger. She was working herself into a fit of hysteria.

_She even scampers on all fours like a cat,_ he noted with a glance over his shoulder. _Her body must be formed that way, even. This must be some alternate world in which evolution took odd turns at odd places, or the aliens did it. What defines "odd", anyway? My perception of "normal" based on what I've seen? But she is so very like a human physically that I must wonder if this planet's evolution branched off from ours somehow. Then again, on Star Wars humans live in galaxies far, far away…_

Johnny rounded another corner into yet another hallway of practice rooms. Judging by the grunts and yells from one door, one was definitely occupied. He passed and barely glimpsed the very kid whose honor was being defended by Miss Kitty, shirtless, wielding a katana, and getting his ass royally pounded by an abnormally huge, muscle-bound old man swinging a sword about the size of the poor kid's entire body.

_Holy shit, roid-monkey alert. Do they even have steroids in this jacked-up hellhole? Wouldn't surprise me, small-minded dicks with their ideals of manhood and knighthood and chivalry. Blah, this is just like high school--_

"VAN-SAMAAAAAAAA!!"

The girl's scampering detoured into the room and stopped abruptly. Johnny turned around. The hallway was now vacant.

"Van-sama! I'm so glad you're here, Van-sama!"

"What's wrong, Merle?"

_Oh, her name is Merle. God, she has a whiney voice. And what the hell is a "sama", anyway?_

The whining continued from within the room, which Johnny could now picture was accentuated with tears and admiring clinging. The old man rumbled something inaudible.

Well, at least she's off my ass for a while. Fuck this. I'm going to get some peace and quiet.

Johnny shoved his hands into his pockets and continued down the wooden hallway, still lost in thought somewhere between Nailbunny and evolutionary theory. Surprisingly, he did not meet a single person.

_Pretty quiet back here._ Johnny looked up from his thoughts. He had wandered into a back hallway, clean, well-polished, and smelling like lavender. _Good thing. Eventually I'll have to go back to my room and get my stuff, damn it._

Something about the lavender made Johnny think of white sheets and fluttering gauze drapes over windows streaming with sunlight and breeze -- and for good measure, singing birds and other such annoying things.

One door toward the end of the hallway was ajar. Johnny walked over to it and peered in. A whiff of compressed, musty air filled his nostrils and airway; he coughed and backed out a few inches. In the sunlight provided by the large hallway windows he could see a dense concentration of dust particles floating out of the room.

_Room is as musty as all hell. Somebody must have left the door ajar to air it out. Shit, can anybody actually LIVE in there?_

Johnny took a deep breath of clean air and peered into the room again. The window was open, casting a sharp bar of yellow sunlight onto more golden dust-motes. The sun was crossing the sky toward the horizon – past noon, which reminded Johnny how hungry he was. The heavy drapes over the windows, the simple bed in the corner, a set of rounded and Oriental-looking armor on the wall arranged with a katana spearing it diagonally, and the bookshelf were wall covered in dust.

_No way in hell this room is still used._ Johnny stepped into the room and closed the door behind his back. _Must be a guest bedroom or something. Sure know how to stock their guests up on books. Must not be much else to do in this jackhole._

Johnny walked further into the room and felt the sharp, metal toe of his boot catch on the rim of a knothole. He looked down. 

_Knothole clear through the floor. Rich family wouldn't let that be there without a reason. And judging by the sun-washing patterns around it a rug or something used to be here._

Johnny kneeled down and pried the floorboard loose with his finger. The board lifted with a shower of dust. Johnny coughed and looked down at the hollow recess below. Spiders skittered off of a small pile of dusty, hardback books, startled by the general noise and commotion.

_Must be pretty damned good stuff for somebody to hide it._ Johnny threw the floorboard aside with a resounding clunk and cloud of dust and reached into the recess. He pulled out a thin, leather bound book with a chord attached to the spine, serving as a bookmark.

_Nice leather…_ Johnny brushed dust off of the slick cover and ran his fingers over the imprint of a curled dragon on the cover. He picked up the charm hanging off of the end of the bookmark and inspected it. It, also, was a dragon.

_This place has a little bit of an obsession with dragons_, he thought, remembering the wrought iron dragons in the city gates and the dragon statues he saw on his way in. However, unlike this dragon, which was curled, slender, and distinctly Oriental, the dragons all over the palace closely resembled obese manta rays. The thought that they were dragons at all did not come to mind until the prince kid asked Johnny not to poke them.

Johnny brushed the dust off of his gloves and opened the book. The pages smelled musty and old, the characteristic smell of and old volume.

_How old is this thing, anyway?_

The pages were lined and hand-written in careful, cursive script. Johnny flipped through the pages. The handwriting remained consistent, sometimes in black ink, sometimes in blue or brownish color, with intermittent blotches from a dip pen and a few pages that were wrinkled in places as if left in mild rain. _Or tears. Fuck, is this somebody's diary?_

Johnny crossed his legs and turned back to the first page. The top entry was brief.

-------

_Purple, 2nd Moon_

_I hate my life. I want to die._

_That is all I feel like saying today._

-------

_Oh, shit. _Johnny grimaced at the open face of the pages. _This is some jacked-up angst-ridden adolescent's memoir to suicide and how much life sucks. And the writing isn't even that good. 'I hate my life' and 'I want to die'? Shit._

------

_Purple, 3rd Moon_

_I reinstate that I did not ask to be born into this position. I know that I have said it several times over, but today it manifests itself again. More and more I think that it was a curse that I started by traveling to Asturia on my own. I was much more happy when I was sufficiently sheltered. _

_The mentality that knowledge, while useful in its most concrete, practical, and sanctioned capacities is safe and all (tangle of scratch-out marks) other more abstract areas of thought are dangerous has left me with no choice but to hide my books from everybody. Van is probably the only person who would not mind or who would support me in any capacity, but he is far too young to understand and would quite possibly let information slip unheeded. Yet, he is still easily spooked by the darker and more esoteric arts, as is understandable. He has been sheltered all four years of his life._

_Not only that, he is an emotional kid._

_I am making a trip to Asturia once again tomorrow under the ruse of cultural sightseeing and weapon inspecting. As wise as my parents (dark scratch marks) (more dark scratch marks) seem they still believe that I am sheltered and innocent, perfectly content to be the dutiful first son and to carry the mantle of inheritance. My blank, welcoming smile is becoming increasingly immaculate. To everybody here, I am a cheerful, carefree boy without a single thought of anything that would make the most superstitious and jumpy of people scream. The only time I am really smiling is when I am with Van. I feel as if I can be myself._

_Van has already shown that he questions and feels for himself, though he plays the dutiful and obedient citizen. The perfect role-model, as he is supposed to be. He is a prince, after all. Royal blood determines so damn much of one's worth._

_I hate myself for putting on this mask and not having the courage to show my parents who I really am. Then again, it would change nothing. The would lock me down, take all of my possessions and hide my nature behind the ruse that I am a very scatterbrained, but dutiful and a perfect role-model for the people of this country. _

_And I loathe who I was just weeks ago. I was that role-model._

 --------------

Johnny blinked and rubbed his eyes. In places, the writing got very squished and unclear, forcing him to squint. The kid wasn't starting to sound so dumb after all. Just young and angsty. 

_This guy should upload this onto DeadJournal. He -- she -- whoever -- would have a fan club. I don't think this is a girl's room, what with the armor and all. Anal-retentive bastards would probably never let a girl of royal blood touch a sword or armor. Or travel on her own. Oh yeah, he said 'boy', right there. Did he say Austria? Is this German?_

_And… wait._ Johnny re-read the writing. _This isn't English, hell, this isn't even my alphabet, but I still understand it. It looks like Greek or something. What the fuck is going on?_

_. . ._

Johnny's pupils contracted to the near point of disappearance. _IT'S THE CHIPS. THE SCIENTISTS WITH THE FUCKING CHIPS. THEY'RE WATCHING ME AS IF I'M A RAT IN A FUCKING MAZE ON DISPLAY. Shit, I won't give them the satisfaction of… of…_

Johnny was quite sure that 'they' wanted him to read the diary (which, in this case, was probably fabricated and stolen from some delusional role-player's DeadJournal) even further, which would mean that the easiest method to piss them off would be to close it and sit quietly for a long time.

It would have been easy had Johnny's curiosity not won the best of him anyway.

-----------

_I finished _Theories for the New Age of Alchemy _yesterday while Balgus gave me a break to help Father with something. Fascinating book, though I must admit that I didn't understand at least half of it. I am a moron. Absolute moron. I have never had formal instruction in any base theory of science or higher mathematics -- 'calculus', it is called -- so this reads like Atlantean to me. I grasped the basis of the theory, though. Particles called 'atoms', to small to be seen by any living creature_ -- (Johnny had a mental flash of the number 6.022 X 1023) -- _create all things in nature, and can be changed and manipulated. How I would love to try that… Alas, the chances of being allowed to go off to an academy and drop all of this king business are about the same as Balgus dropping his samurai duties to be a thespian at the art academy._

_I think I have enough money to get another few books. At least the man in the underground shop never asks me for my age. I can pass for being far beyond my years, though. He must assume that I am of age._

-------------

_"Of age to do what, kid? Read porn?"_

------------

_I have heard rumors in the town that a northern nation called Zaibach is beginning to _(scratch scratch) _initiate a slew of experiments of a highly complex nature that boarders on the fantastic. I have learned both to never trust rumors and always trust rumors one hears on the streets of Asturia, so I can only wonder. Those sorts of rumors never reach Fanelia._

_And… oh yeah, I finished_ Scarlet_. I am so, so, so_ (vigorous scratch marks) _fortunate that nobody has caught me…_

_Tonight is another formal dinner. I dislike my formal clothes. I think an iron maiden would be more comfortable and significantly less embarrassing._

_My back is sore again._

------------

Johnny flipped the page, paused, and turned to the very last page of the book. It was blank and hanging half off of the binding. He flipped back a few pages until he found the last entry. _Almost the entire book. Kid likes to write._

Johnny flipped back to his reading place and draped the diary on its face over his leg. He intertwined his fingers and rested his chin on the resulting fist. 

_Alchemy. Inheritance. Prince. King. Royal. This is a hell of a lot like the Middle Ages. Or Dungeons and Dragons or Final Fantasy or some other such shit._

_…what the hell is_ Scarlet_?_

Johnny leaned down and dug around in the small collective of books in the hole, pushing aside various titles on theory and history and what he assumed judging by the pentacles etched onto the covers was some form of Wicca. Near the bottom of the pile was a red-dyed book with the title _Scarlet_ written in the spine – in a different language than the diary, which Johnny could also for some reason understand. Damn sadistic experimenters.

_This ought to be good…_

Johnny opened the book to a dog-eared page near the center.

----------

_It has been noted that homosexual couples, unlike heterosexual couples, tend to concentrate most fully upon making each other feel as good as possible for as long as possible, taking in every sensation and second for its full value. Heterosexual couples tend to have the mentality of working toward a goal – the moment of climax – and having this in the back of mind during the entire process of sex. This creates the feeling that the small things – the act itself, foreplay, kisses and touches – are on a lower plane of existence (or a slope, if we picture the act as sloping up to a peak) and, while greatly enjoyed, are not considered the most integral part of the act._

_So, we encourage heterosexual couples (the vast majority of our readers) to experiment with merely taking in every second as the most integral, making the entire act an act of worship and not concentrating on a "goal"…_

------

Johnny finally tore his eyes away from the book and slammed it shut. He stared ahead of him blankly for a few moments.

_It's a fucking sex manual._ He ran a shaky hand over his face. The rest of his body was not too sturdy in comparison. _Holy shit. This kid reads this stuff to get off._

Johnny took a few deep breaths and collected his thoughts. In the first place, that was not graphic at all, so why the hell was it affecting him? It's not like he picked up full frontal porn or something. It was an entirely theoretical passage that, in retrospect, did sound very much like Wiccan theory, but without a single mention of the God or the Goddess. 

_I'm not Wiccan or anything so I probably don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. But… FUCK, that's not even the point right now. ARGH._

Johnny grasped his head._ Damn it, I'm living without responding to urges, aren't I? I will not respond to any carnal, base longings of the flesh, driven by the hormones of this disreputable machine. I have conquered that part of myself. Yes, frozen, utterly frozen._

A voice in the back of Johnny's head laughed. Johnny growled and shoved it back into his mind.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP! I AM NOT IN THE MOOD FOR ANY SHIT FROM ANY ONE OF MY DERRANGED INNER VOICES! DO NOT TRY TO BREAK MY WILL!"

The voice went silent.

_One's own voices will try to break one's own will. So broken, so pathetic, that one's urges and one's self are in conflict. Inhabiting the same body gets crowded._

Johnny made a dark face and picked up the book lying closed in his lap. _I'll show you. Watch. I NO RESPOND!_

Johnny opened up to a random page and stared at it. There was a well-detailed line art picture of a woman with her head buried between the legs of another woman, the latter of whom looked in a state of ecstasy.

". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."

Johnny's hands were shaking by the time he returned to his senses enough to remember where he was and what he was doing. The book fell to the floor. 

He was getting aroused.

A fragment of the (screaming) conversation he had with Reverend MEAT not long ago came to mind: _"I'll forget my stomach if I'm hungry! Shut off my want if I'm lonely! Tear off my genitals if I'm aroused! EXCESS! SO MUCH EXCESS!!"_

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!"

Johnny stood up, swayed, and ran himself into the wall. The bed frame and the bookshelf rattled with the force, escalating as Nny kept slamming his back—shoulders—back—head—head—arm—

"NO! NO, I REFUSE TO BECOME A CREATURE GOVERNED BY SUCH DISGUSTING URGES AND DESIRES AS THOSE OF THE FLESH. BASE! THE MOST CRUDE OF HUMAN EMOTIONS AND DESIRES, CLOSEST TO THE ANIMAL-LIKE STATE OF MOST 'PEOPLE' I HAVE HAD THE DISPLEASURE OF MEETING! I REFUSE!"

The pain and slamming were not improving the situation at all. Contrary, the situation was escalating in both meanings of the term.

This was not the effect Johnny wanted.

"Fuck…" Johnny stopped slamming himself into the stone wall and rested his cheek against the rock. The stone was cool and rough against his flushed cheek. "I'm a masochist. Of course, pain gets me off. Fuck, that didn't help at all. Shit. Shit shit shit shit.

"…I really hate myself…"

Johnny slid down the wall, curled, and clutched his knees to his chest, forcing himself to breathe slowly. _This is so fucking disgusting. Shit. I'm disgusting. I have an erection and there's fucking nothing I can do about it but wait until I go limp. I utterly despise the human machine._

_…why the hell am I in here again…_

-----------------------------------

Dilandau, Gatti, and Migel finally reached the _Vione_ after many failed and clumsy attempts to pick up Nny's car with their Alseides units' claws in the solid form. It was proving to be quite impossible until Migel suggested that they partially melt their claws to mould them around the car and, with that much firmer of a grip, haul the car up to the fortress.

It worked. The glory would have been significantly more glowing had Dilandau not been cross for being outthought in a matter involving a guymelef.

Migel sat in the cockpit of his Alseides, still nursing his chin from the slap he had received 'for not MOVING' when he, Gatti, and Dilandau found themselves walking down a narrow corridor to report and he had slowed momentarily to think on something, which now he had forgotten, leaving Dilandau momentarily trapped behind him. Migel and Gatti knew damn well that Dilandau was just bitter, but it didn't do well to say anything.

The fact that Dilandau was far more cross than he should have been for a mere correction of his logic was shown by his election to use the back of his hand, which was armored with metal gauntlets.

Migel removed the gauze from his lip and checked the area that had been touching the broken skin, noting that the blood flow was slowing. He placed a clean area to his lip and sat back in his seat. Dalet and Chesta would already be in position to attack the Fanelian capital by now, along with a few soldiers of lower rank under their command. It was going to be an easy, in-and-out mission. The Fanelian guymelefs were old and in poor repair, far slower and weaker than Zaibach's models. Besides, the Zaibach melefs had the stealth mantles, which were worth their weight in platinum, never mind gold. 

_It doesn't keep me from worrying, though._ Migel settled back in his seat and chanced a brief glance at the gauze before replacing it. _Hell, even Chesta is being less of a worrywart than me about this mission. I really need to lighten up. _

Contrary to first impressions, Dalet was not as reckless as he seemed due to his hypomanic behavior. He was surprisingly responsible and level-headed in battle. By the same token, Chesta was not nearly as innocent or timid as he appeared on the surface, a fact that became twice as evident when he was behind the controls of his Alseides.

_Guymelefs do odd things to people._ Migel looked at the gauze. The bleeding had stopped. He crumpled the gauze in his fist. _It is like wearing a mask or a disguise. One is much braver behind armor or a mask. There is more of an awareness of the advantages one holds and of the damage one can do. _

Had Dalet been capable of hearing his internal monologue, he would have told Migel not to think so hard and tie himself into knots. Migel smiled to himself and undid the top buttons of his jacket so that he could reach into his undershirt and pull out a translucent, blue sphere on a gold chain. The sphere was inlaid into a curled golden fish.

'It's a water medallion from the mermen,' Dalet said the day he gave it to Migel. 'Supposedly it is supposed to make you relax and flow easily with situations, like fish in water. Or like water itself. I forgot. Whatever. You need it badly.'

'Oh, that's what it is. At first I thought it was an ice medallion.'

'No, the last thing you need is to be more uptight and frozen.' Dalet had kissed Migel on the forehead on that point, something that reminded Migel that Dalet was, as he kept bragging, a full cil taller than Mig. That was the cardinal reason Dalet used that sign of affection.

'Right, because you're taller you're automatically the dominant one in this relationship.'

'No, I think that would be because I have such a dominating persona," Dalet half-whispered, half growled into Migel's neck. That was one of Dalet's quirks: diving directly for the neck and staying there for a while. It had started the theory that Dalet was a vampire, but after some very bored exploration with a wire one afternoon they determined that his teeth were not hollow so as so properly suck blood.

Migel should have known that using that wording would leave an opening involving 'That only applies only to being unable to suck _blood_…' The marks on Mig's neck did not disappear for a week. Avoiding everybody to take a shower was a pain. Considering that with mutual affection Dalet was in the same boat, he at least had somebody to suffer with him. The experience had taught them not to lose control in situations in which marking each other's bodies was almost inevitable. They were quite good at pulling things off cleanly now.

Migel ran his finger over the orb thoughtfully and checked his timepiece. Under normal circumstances he would be in endurance training, running laps around the _Vione_ walkways in full armor, but today was given as a free day to those not involved in the attack. Theoretically, 'free day' was supposed to mean 'free workout', but as with most theories the story changed when exposed to real-world application.

The Alseides' intercom went off. Migel opened one eye and pressed the 'answer' button.

"This is Migel Labariel."

"Hey, love. You sound about three times as sexy over the long-range radio."

"I had a feeling it was you." Migel sat back and smiled to himself. "So, how long until you initiate the battle, commander?"

"Hey, as Chesta keeps reminding me, we're co-commanders in this operation. I'm still taking orders from Dilandau-sama anyway."

"Will he care when you start ransacking the place?"

"Just because he needs the security in ordering us around, yes."

"Right, right." Migel ran his thumb around the curve of the orb. "Did he say when the attack is to start?"

"Sunset, love. You know how bad the damn glare on the reverse side of the mantles can be in direct light."

_Water. Water. Chill._

"Um, yeah." An awkward silence settled. "So… how are you doing?"

"Great. We really don't have much to talk about, do we?"

"Nope."

"Great. Let's have verbal sex."

Migel almost choked, which took effort considering that nothing was in his mouth.

"These conversations are monitored, you moron!" he hissed.

"Hey, chill." _Chill._ "Nobody's going to give a damn if we get off or not."

"Other than Dilandau-sama."

"I don't know why he would care."

"He doesn't _need_ a reason, Dalet!" _Oh fuck, what if he's listening to this right now?_ "He's … Dilandau-sama. Doesn't that sum it up?"

"You know what?" Migel could picture Dalet leaning back in his seat and smirking. "I bet he's avoiding his intercom to avoid Folken-sama."

"You're that sure."

"Of course I am, darling."

_What the hell sort of a mood is he in? 'Darling'? I would be concerned if I didn't think he got off on those sorts of pet names._

"Oh, fine," Migel said flatly. "Let's go. Look, I'm sucking you off right now. Oh-god, I'm choking. Oh-god-you-are-so-big. Oh baby, oh baby. I want you. Harder."

Dalet started laughing madly. Migel rolled his eyes. _Hypomanic son-of-a-bitch…_

"Oh, come on." Dalet was almost inaudible with laughter he was trying to choke back in order to talk. "Lighten up. I can picture you scowling right now. Yeah, that's it; roll your eyes at me. It's sexy."

"Fuck you."

"Isn't that what I've been asking for all this time?"

"Maybe, Mr. Kaine, maybe."

"Why are you so formal all of a sudden?"

"Hell, I don't know. It sounds euphonic. Dalet Kaine."

"Euphonic, Mr. Vocabulary. And I like Migel Labariel, but Migel Kaine sounds better."

"I'm not taking your name, jackass. You take mine. Dalet Labariel sounds better anyway."

"I don't think so. I'm supposed to be the dominant one."

"Fuck. You."

"Yes, thank you. That would be nice."

"Up the ass with a crima claw."

"Oh, that's harsh, Mig. Look, I'm going to cry."

"Cry your heart out."

"Because I know that tears get you off, sado-masochist."

Migel could not think of a good response to that one. He had been staring sideways at the intercom for the vast majority of the conversation with crossed arms; he curled back against the cockpit wall and rested his forehead on his fingertips. The shifted position felt more comfortable.

"Are you mad?" Dalet asked.

"No. Why would I be?"

Dalet was silent for a moment.  Then…

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…"

"Oh, hell no."

"…you make me happy when skies are gray…"

"Dalet, shove it. I'm serious. I will kick your ass when you get back."

"…you'll never know, dear, how much I love you; oh please don't take my sunshine away…"

"Shove it."

"Oh, come on, Mr. Sunshine. Don't be like that."

Ironically, and Migel was well aware of this, the 'Mr. Sunshine' nickname had come about as a product of his curt and often irritated demeanor. He did know, nor did he want to know, where Dalet had first heard that damned song, but the name had never died and had unfortunately caught on with Chesta and Gatti. 

_Why am I so irritated all the time, anyway?_

"Mig? You there?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

"And just what the hell do you two think you are doing?" Dilandau asked quietly.

Migel's heart jerked to a momentary stop. _Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit…_

"D-Dilandau-sama!" Dalet yelled.

"Da~alet…" (Migel winced; Dilandau only spoke in that tone when he was seconds away from explosion.) "You are supposed to be on alert for a signal to attack, aren't you?"

The tone was chilling. Migel chewed on his lip. _Please, please don't say something stupid, you uncouth moron…_

"Yes, Dilandau-sama."

"And why aren't you?"

Migel had a vivid mental image of Dilandau leaning back in his seat with one ankle resting on the other knee, holding his head in such a position that his finger pressed into his temple. It was a deceptively beautiful picture of tranquility and self-control. Dilandau's self control was utterly nil. It was at such a level that it was seriously strained to converse calmly for more than twenty seconds after the point at which Dilandau became irritated, which Migel labeled 'point X'. 

"Because…"

"Because what, Dalet?" The average outsider would believe that Dilandau was sweetly coaxing Dalet into an answer for which he would be gently scolded. The average outsider soon learned that Dilandau was as gentle as hot coals were soothing on one's face.

"I'm sorry, Lord."

"You should be. And you, Migel--" Migel winced. "--should be running laps around the deck right now, aren't you?"

"Yes, Dilandau-sama." Migel swallowed. His mouth was dry. "I was just about to begin."

"Good. Then I won't keep you any longer. Dalet--" Dilandau's tone changed to a snap. "Get ready to move out."

"Yes, Dilandau-sama."

Dilandau's intercom clicked off. Migel sighed; he was probably still listening in to their conversation. Now would not be the time to say anything unsavory.

"I guess you've got to move," he said dully. _Oh, that was smart._

"Yeah. I'll see you later."

"Be careful." _Please be careful. Don't make me worry about you any more than I do. I love you._

"Thanks."

Dalet's intercom clicked off. A faint, high-pitched whine of static remained. Migel sighed and shut off the intercom completely. The guymelef became silent.


	4. Halo 04: Encounter

**Halo 04: Encounter**

"All right, gentlemen." Dilandau continued pacing in front of the assembled melefs on foot, speaking into a small intercom and knowing fully well where they were even though they were invisible. He could feel the dense heat from their engines. They created an invisible, warm windbreak. 

"You are aware of the situation. I have gone over this several times. Get the White Dragon, torch the place, leave no witnesses, and get out. Are we clear on this?"

"Yes, sir."

"Chesta and Dalet are in charge. They take orders directly from me. Obey them as you would me."

"Yes, sir."

"Chesta and Dalet…"

"H-hai…" said Chesta.

"Un…" said Dalet.

"You will take my every order as if it were your life's dependence. Do not think that this new position has made you any more important than you once were. You're still Dragonslayers under my command. I will not tolerate any deviation. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Un."

Dilandau stopped pacing and glared sideways at his intercom. "Dalet, is there a problem?"

"…no, Dilandau-sama."

"…good." Dilandau resumed pacing. "Keep your intercoms on at all times. If you receive any orders from the _Vione that do not come from me directly, you will check with me before making any sort of moves. My orders override all others. Do I make myself clear?"_

"Yes, sir."

"Um… Dilandau-sama…"

"_What_, Dalet?"

"What if we get contradictory orders from Folken-sama?"

Dilandau stopped and clenched the intercom so tightly that it creaked along its seams. "WHAT DID I _SAY_, DALET?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." Dilandau faced the patch of heated, industrial air that was the melefs. "No mistakes. This is a quick in-and-out mission involving some backwater hicks with rusted melefs that still run on the same technology that they had generations ago. And remember that we just got the melefs repainted. Don't scratch them. Any dirt that gets on them you will rub off with your own toothbrush. And yes, I know it's impossible to keep them perfectly clean. It's an incentive to keep them as clean as possible."

There was a silence. "…yes, sir."

"Good. Make me proud, my Dragonslayers. Remember that you are the elite of the Zaibach army. Do not fail me."

Dilandau clicked off the intercom and walked back to his own Alseides, hidden in a thicket, stealth mantle activated. A murder of crows flew toward it, sensed the heat and density of an object with senses that most humans neglect to use, and avoided it neatly.

"Fucking not able to go on a fucking torch mission… fuck this… shove a sword up his ass…"

-----------------

Zongi watched the distant town from atop the currently invisible _Vione_. It was able to withstand the searing heat from the vertical turbine / boiler complexes and the resulting high-humidity pocket for short periods of time, though sweat was already dripping from its temples. The breeze had stopped because the ship was currently stationary. The discomfort was well worth it to get outside for a little while.

A cloud of dust arose from the city as the gates were torn off. The wood flew several yards back into the woods.

_It's starting._

------------

_…at least I think this current run of rather pointless adolescent depression is over for the time being. I will always be prone to relapses, but at least I can fight it off. No matter what happens, I think I'll be all right. I'm going to be king someday soon, and I will hate it, but at least I will have the opportunity to change some things. There are many laws I am going to abolish._

_I am also going to abolish the monarchy and establish a representative government. I've read enough about empires on the Mystic Moon to know how to avoid a tragic downfall resulting from such._

_Hm… oh, yes, today we had potatoes for breakfast again and Van launched his spoon—_

------------

The room shook.

Johnny looked up from his reading and stared at the ceiling. Dust was showering down from the wooden boards.

The room shook again. Hard.

"What the fuck?"

Johnny snapped the book shut, stood from his cross-legged position, and looked out the window.

A huge, bulbous appendage swiveled out of midair and shot a metal claw into the window.

"SHIT!"

Johnny threw himself to the ground and covered his head with the diary as the crima claw crashed through the window, shattering glass across the floor and Johnny himself, and wound and corkscrewed through the door. The door exploded spectacularly. The claw twisted around in the hallway as if looking for survivors, then snap-contracted back into the appendage.

Johnny remained on the floor for a while.

"…what the HELL?"

He sat up and brushed the broken glass off of his back and hair, keeping below the windowsill. His hands and the nape of his neck were bleeding.

_Shit. What the shit? What the hell…_

Johnny shook the loose glass out of the back of his shirt and cautiously peeked over the windowsill.

The city was being ransacked.

Johnny blinked. The bulbous arms, emerging out of what almost seemed to be rippling cloaks of air, were intermittently torching buildings or stabbing opposing mecha with the claws. Many buildings were already building and collapsing. The ground was littered with fallen melefs.

The sky was orange and black.

"IT'S A GUNDAM! Wait… no…" Johnny thought for a moment. "…shit."

Johnny scrambled across the floor, blindly snatched a few books out of the recess in the floor, and scrambled across the splinters and wooden spars of what was once a door into the hallway.

He needed to get out of there. Now.

-------------

Chesta spun around and speared the last samurai guymelef in the area, faintly hearing the cry from its occupant. The melef went limp with the claw still inside. It took several attempts to yank the claw free of the mess.

He controlled the backlash from the claw's release and switched the intercom to talk mode. "Dalet, this is Chesta. The last resistance forces in the southeast sector have been eradicated."

The intercom crackled as soon as Chesta released the button. The signals were getting bad. 

"I found the shrine. Calling for backup—"

"Chesta, Dalet, come in," said Dilandau.

Chesta hurriedly pressed the response button. "This is Chesta. What are your orders, Dilandau-sama?"

"There is another target you must capture. Search for a civilian wearing odd clothes. One who looks out-of-place."

"…sir?"

"The tracks from that odd contraption we found out in the fields lead toward the road. The person is probably in Fanelia. If you've already offed him, bring the corpse."

"…yes, sir."

The _Vione_-frequency static cracked off. Chesta sighed and looked around. There was no life for blocks. All of the civilians had already fled to the mountains, and all of the fighting men were dead or dying.

_I do not want to go searching through rubble for a corpse. Damn it…_

Chesta sighed and maneuvered his guymelef over to the wreckage of a small house. Whoever had said that a soldier's life was entirely glory and battle was obviously a moron—

Somebody dressed in dark clothes sprinted across the open square.

Chesta blinked and turned around in his seat, squinting through the slats in the grille. The figure was indeed dressed oddly and laden down with a heavy backpack.

Chesta blinked. _What the hell is he doing? He's running around in broad daylight across a battlefield, and he's only armed with two machetes! He's going to get killed! Is he CRAZY?_

Chesta pressed the intercom button.

"Secondary target spotted. Proceeding to capture."

-----------------

Johnny stopped in an alley behind the rubble of a house, leaning against a half-demolished wall and holding his machetes in either hand. He had stopped in his room on the way out of the main palace to collect his backpack. Against his better judgment he had searched for his weapons and had found them in what appeared to be somebody's office, luckily in the same hallway of his own room. 

He had barely made it out of the building. Less than a minute later, his wing of the complex had been completely trashed.

"…shiiit…"

Johnny readjusted the weight of his backpack and shoved his machetes in a cross through the back of his belt. It was time to get the hell out of here.

Something industrial switched gears behind him. It hissed.

Johnny ducked.

Another crima claw, this time softer and more flexible, stopped in a half-curled loop where his torso had once been. It seemed to be forced into curling by being pushed against an invisible wall.

"…AAAAH!"

Johnny scrambled under the claw, straightened, and bolted. 

The weight of the backpack was becoming jarring. He slowed momentarily to cast it off when the metal shot out once again and painfully molded itself around his torso. The metal was searing hot and already tightening painfully.

"AAAAAH!!"

The backpack was smashed into his back; the machetes, in turn, pressed painfully into the small of his back and sliced him through the skin that was being pressed over the blades. His ribs creaked.

"OWWW! SHIT! SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT! STOP IT, YOU FUCK!"

The claw lifted him into the air, still running fruitlessly and struggling. It brought itself to an invisible face.

Johnny blinked and stopped running, though he was still subconsciously trying to jerk his arms free. He felt definite heat radiating from something just a meter from himself. He looked down. The appendage from which the claw had issued was pushing aside what appeared to be a mantle of air, revealing a small sliver of blue metal, rivets and gears, in the formation of what he was sure was a proverbial torso and a leg.

One thing was for sure. This was not a Gundam.

"HEY! FUCKER!" Johnny started his struggles afresh. "PUT ME DOWN OR I SWEAR THAT I WILL SLASH YOUR GUT OPEN AND SEAR YOUR FACE OFF WITH YOUR OWN STOMACH ACID! YEAH! YOU THINK I CAN'T DO IT? I AM INVINCIBLE! I CANNOT DIE! NO MATTER WHAT I DO, I ALWAYS WIN! YOU CAN'T WIN AGAINST ME! THE COPS CAN'T TOUCH ME! NEVER BEEN CAUGHT! HEY! LISTEN TO ME, YOU MUTE FUCK!"

The melef turned and strode toward the gate.

"HEY! YEAH, YOU! I KNOW YOU CAN UNDERSTAND ME BECAUSE OF THE BABEL FISH CHIPS!  I SPEAK-A YOUR LANGUAGE! SEE, I SPEAK GIBBERSISH! PUT ME DOWN, YOU SON OF A BITCH! SPINNELESS RECTAL TICK! WHAT'S WRONG? IS THINKING WITH YOUR BRAIN INSTEAD OF YOUR DICK TOO HARD FOR ONCE?"

The claw gently contracted and drew Johnny within the folds of the stealth mantle. The appendage dropped limply to the melef's side. The metal, still warm, molded itself so that Johnny hung vertically in a small cocoon.

Johnny blinked. Within the mantle, he could still see everything clearly, though the air appeared to be oily.

"…HEY!"

-------------------

"I'LL HAVE YOUR GUTS AS SINIEW AND MAKE SLINGSHOTS TO FIRE TABLE DARTS UP YOUR ASS! SHOVE YOUR OWN GEARS DOWN YOUR THROAT! Hey… is there a pilot in this thing?"

Chesta winced and continued taking long, measured strides toward the remnants of the city gates. This prisoner definitely had full usage of spicy language, nothing that he not heard before, but not in such very creative ways. This one was going to be a handful.

_I hope Dilandau-sama can handle this one. If the prisoner knows what is good for him, he'll keep his mouth shut. All talk and no action. What a crude, ineffective man. Sure sign of cowardice._

The intercom crackled.

"Chess?" asked Dalet.

Chesta pressed the 'talk' button. "I'm here. I have apprehended the prisoner. Proceeding back to the _Vione immediately. How are things on your side of the town?"_

"We've cornered the activated Dragon and the prince in the shrine. Proceeding to capture."

"Oh. Good luck."

"Thanks. See you back at base."

Dalet clicked off. Chesta sighed and stepped outside the city gates. He dropped the stealth mantle.

"I see you've gone quiet down there."

He knew that the prisoner could not hear him. The subtle vibrations through the crima claw resulting from struggling had tapered off. He looked down at the prisoner through the grille slats and half expected to see him hanging limply, unconscious.

The prisoner was staring straight back at him. He did not look amused.

"…hi."

The prisoner's expression did not change. If anything, it was growing steadily angrier. It had moved past the stage of uncouth rage into the silent, stewing anger.

It was so like the stage transition he had seen in Dilandau-sama that it scared him.

The prisoner's mouth twitched.

Chesta gave the prisoner a wan look. He was in a guymelef, controlling the claw, behind several inches of sheet metal. No matter how much the prisoner tried, he could not move until Chesta released him. The machetes looked as if they would snap against his armor, anyway.

"Just calm down, down there." Chesta had raised his voice so that he could be heard. "I'm not going to hurt you."

The prisoner stared silently.  
"…lost your voice or something?"

"……"

"…fine."

Chesta lifted off of the ground and switched into flight mode.

"……AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

"Shhhh," he said absentmindedly.

The struggles and string of curses resumed with the intensity of second wind and sheer terror. Chesta sighed heavily.

"I'll have you on the ground in a few moments, you know. I'm not going to drop you."

"I'M GOING TO DIE! NO, I CAN'T DIE! I CAN'T DIE! IF YOU DROP ME, I'LL REMAIN ALIVE WITH FULL AWARENESS OF MY BATTERED, INTERNALLY PUNCTURED BODY!"

"Loony… freaking bats. Completely insane."

"NAILBUNNY! WAKE ME UP! MR. EFF! PSYCHODOUGHBOY! SOMEBODY! NAILBUNNY! NAILBUNNY!"

-----------------------

The hydraulic pistons controlling the hangar gate hissed loudly.

Dilandau watched the hangar open from the suspended walkway, loosely grasping the railing. The gate rose at an angle, curling along grooves and slats and flattening itself back out at a parallel with the ceiling. A glairing sliver of orange sunset expanded across the floor.

_This had better be good._ The rectangle of sunlight moved up Dilandau's body. His armor and golden-clasped leather glared back. _Only decent light in this fucking place.__ All of this doom and gloom gets boring. Chesta had better have something decent with him. I'm in no mood to mess with petty civilians._

Dilandau hoped that the prisoner would be feisty. He had been ordered long ago never to harm any prisoner unless in self-defense. Folken had added 'not even as a preemptive measure' just as Dilandau had been getting his hopes up about using that very loophole. Pacifist fuck.

Chesta's Alseides closed in on the hangar bay as a black figure against the glare, light refracting painfully off of its edges. It was holding something in its claw.

The thing was struggling and cursing.

Dilandau smiled slowly. _Excellent… good work, Chesta._

---------------------

"I do not know why you insist upon hiding everything from us, Folken. We are your former mindmates. Though you have quit our organization, we would like to remain comrades in our pursuit for knowledge. A beautiful mind such as your own should not work on its own. It needs the clarity of experience and worldliness to edit its raw majesty."

"Hm." Folken smiled to himself. He was walking down the hall followed by the four Sorcerers, the latter of whom had decided to make a surprise visit to collect all of his evidence and information from the past night. They were refusing to leave him alone.

"Did you write that speech yourself?"

"Don't be cocky." Foruma barely narrowed his eyes at the taller man's back. "You forget your place, child."

"I am no longer a child."

"You will always be a child to me. A silly, idealistic adolescent child. Everything that you know you have learned from us. You owe everything to us. Don't forget what you once were."

"Do you really think so?"

"Don't think that just because you're Emperor Dornkirk's new favorite little data dog that you hold any sort of an edge over the rest of this organization." Kuaru released breath through his nose angrily. "We always have been and always will be your superiors. You are the apprentice."

"And it would be fitting," said Foruma, "for you to show your gratitude by surrendering the samples that you attained without our approval."

"Hm."

"Folken, don't make this any harder than it already is. Don't be difficult. Don't treat us the same way you do when we merely request that you take medication."

The last speaker was Garufo. Folken stopped.

The Sorcerers waited patiently. Kuaru looked positively smug.

"…" 

Folken glanced over his shoulder at such an angle that the collar of his cloak shielded the lower half of his face. "…it has already been consumed."

"Oh, you don't say." Foruma stared back. "By what, pray tell? The plumbing system? The boilers? A beaker of sulfuric acid?"

Folken stared and tried to think of some sort of witty yet enigmatic reply.

"Or was it nitric acid?" asked Kuaru.

"I thought the resulting compound would make an ideal alternative fuel."

A tremor ran through the walls, shaking the blue-flame lamps in their wall sconces. The scientists looked up.

"It sounds as though somebody is arriving in the hangar," said Foruma.

"Hm." Folken turned on his heel and continued walking. The Sorcerers continued following.

"Don't you have some sort of business to which to attend, gentlemen?"

"Our business is with you. And we will refuse to leave until all physical evidence and data are surrendered to us."

"Hm." 

_Damn it, why can't the bastards just leave? I do not want them breathing down my neck for the next few weeks! Damn it… damn it…I'll have to find some way to counter this…_

"I am sure that if you gentlemen visit the inner offices you will be assigned quarters to your liking."

"We thank you for your hospitality. We need to stretch our legs, you see. Following you around is like having our own tour of the most inner happenings of this ship."

_And you can burn in hell, you bastard._

Folken furrowed his eyebrows slightly. The melef in the hangar was the return party from Fanelia, either bringing Van and the Escaflowne or the suspect visitor from the Mystic Moon. At this moment, he would half-rather see only the Dragonslayers returning empty-handed. At least that way the Sorcerers would not collect any of the evidence that he needed. It would be easier to attain running about in the woods than through acres of red tape in the capitol.

"And might we ask…" said Paruchi, "just why you are not personally overseeing operations on the forward deck? This is part of your job description, Strategos. If this mission fails, you will be the one to blame in the capitol."

_Because I can't stand to watch units I command burn down my home country, let alone the country I abandoned. I can order them about, but I can't watch the consequences of my actions. I'm a bloody coward. Leave me alone._

"I trust the command to Dilandau Albatou."

"Not a wise decision on your part, Strategos Folken."

Folken stepped out onto the gangplank across the guymelef docking bay. Dilandau was already standing on the hangar floor, where a single Alseides had recently landed and was releasing steam to cool the levistones. The steam curled across the floor as a thick, curling lake of milky fog that poured out the closing door and into the sunset as a proverbial waterfall.

The Alseides had a person curled in one of its crima claws. Dilandau was interviewing him.

"Is this the one from the Mystic Moon or your younger brother?" Foruma hissed into Folken's ear.

Folken mentally brushed him off and walked toward the stairs at the far end of the gangplank.

---------------

Dilandau cut a path through the dense steam that closed itself after his passage, leaving a dark gash in the milk that was already beginning to dissipate. The prisoner continued to struggle and twist his shoulders frantically, though he had gone silent.

"You, prisoner." Dilandau stopped and placed his hands on his hips, drawing himself up to his full height. "You are now the prisoner of the Zaibach Army. Do not speak unless you are spoken to. I am Dilandau Albatou, the commander of your apprehender. Henceforth, I am your master. I decide whether or not you live."

Johnny glared at Dilandau and stopped struggling. Dilandau narrowed one eye. What an odd-looking, ratty catch.

"Do you have a name?"

"Johnny." Johnny thought for a moment. "Johnny C. _You may __not call me 'Nny'."_

"Johnny C? Do you have a full surname?"

"It's all I care to give to you, fucker. Um… can you get me down from here, Commander Dildo?"

"…_Dildo_?"

"Yeah, or whatever you said your name was. Very painful."

The cockpit hatch opened with a hiss of clean steam. Chesta unhooked himself from the guymelef's restraints, stood on the edge of the hatch, and saluted.

"The respected suspect was apprehended, sir."

"No kidding. Thank you, Chesta."

"Excuse me…" said Johnny.

"I said that you will speak only when spoken to."

"Only 'to when you are spoken', you illiterate goat-fuck. Get me down."

Dilandau's lip curled. "…all right," he said quietly.

"Lord Folken is here, sir," said Chesta.

"I don't care. Chesta, release him."

"…sir?"

"I said…" Dilandau rolled his eyes to Chesta dangerously slowly. "…release him."

"…h-hai…"

Chesta lowered his gaze and stooped back into the melef. He released a lever; the crima claw responded by loosening enough to drop Johnny face-down onto the stone floor, the backpack making his fall more forceful.

Johnny coughed and pushed himself up onto his arms.

Dilandau smiled slowly and kicked Johnny in the face.

"Dilandau!" yelled Folken.

Johnny collapsed onto his arms and, after a moment, spat blood out of his mouth. Dilandau watched the boy struggle to regain support with his arms. He lifted Johnny's chin with his toe.

"What was that you were saying about a dildo, hm? Illiterate goat-fuck, was that it?"

Johnny observed his tormentor for a moment, and then smiled with the air of one who sees the same humor in a situation as watching a car hit a cat. 

"Yeah. I see that we're already moving into the insecure asshole stage of psychological development. This development being within this past few minutes, or within the whole span of your life, whichever you choose."

"WHAT?"

"It means that you're an insecure little prick with nothing but animalistic violence and a beautiful face to cover up your sub-primordial IQ, your violent tendencies and self-serving—"

Dilandau removed his toe from Johnny's chin for a split second, allowing the head to drop a fraction of a centimeter before kicking him under the head hard enough to knock him onto his back.

"YOU THINK YOU UNDERSTAND ME, BITCH?"

Johnny wormed out of his backpack, still turtle-back on the ground, and barely avoided Dilandau's heel, which was aimed at his nose. He rolled across the floor and stood, drawing his machetes in the same movement.

"I think I see nothing different or special about you. Yes, a beautiful soldier's body capable of great cruelty like a marching little mindless puppet of violence and war. A mysterious persona, an eccentric or 'different' appearance of fashionable insanity, but there really is nothing of substance TO—"

Dilandau charged and sliced his sword down toward Johnny's head; Johnny caught the sword at the apex of crossed blades. Dilandau untangled himself and slashed at Johnny's exposed stomach.

Johnny neatly dodged.

_What the HELL?_ Dilandau circled around Johnny and charged once again, aiming for the collarbone. His opponent danced backwards lightly and charged his own stomach, forcing Dilandau to jump back. 

_His style is entirely amateurish, and he's still dodging me—_

"DILANDAU, STOP."

Dilandau faintly noticed Folken running down the stairs, subtly holding up the skirts of his robe, and then smirked as the he tripped on the stairs, fell onto his back, and cascaded shoulders-first to the hangar floor, cracking his head. His attention was not sufficiently taken from the battle at hand so as to provide an opening; the movements of countering and attacking came so naturally that he didn't even need to think anymore. All he needed was an awareness of the moment.

"Think it's funny, do you? Pain of others? You sick fuck!" 

Johnny slashed at Dilandau's abdomen. Dilandau snarled, hair already dashing sweat into his face, and crouched for a moment, sizing up his opponent. Johnny was his height, but he must have weighed half as much, obviously in no fighting shape; there would be no way that he could outlast Dilandau…

_But why the FUCK can't I hit him?_

Dilandau numbly noticed that by this point Folken had long since recovered—though the fair, drawn-back hair by his left ear was matted with blood—and was now hanging around the fringes of the battle, reaching out of his cloak with his claw and concentrating on Johnny as if he were about to grab him at the slightest chance. Dilandau snorted; whatever natural reflexes Folken had were doubled with his fake arm, but Folken would treat this ingrate favorably. He needed to learn—a—

"AAAAH!"

Johnny whirled both machetes down in a butterfly-arc toward Dilandau's head. He only saw the brief, fluid flash of metal wings, momentarily hypnotized, then jumped backwards and felt the sting of a blade barely slicing his collarbone through leather. Johnny snapped the blades down and scissor-slashed what would have been Dilandau's abdomen had not the latter the reflexes to jump back.

_Fancy, but amateurish. Chesta could gut him in seconds._ Dilandau's eyes widened. _Why—WHY—WHY? Why can't I kill the bastard?_

Johnny backed up momentarily, heaving, crouching and glaring at Dilandau. His black eyeliner was running down his cheeks with sweat.

Dilandau stared back at Johnny and cautiously and began to circle, stepping ankle over ankle. Prey that thinks too much, such as this one, should be such an easy catch—so EASY—then WHY—why…

Folken seized Johnny by the neck and dug his foreclaw into the boy's neck. Johnny's pupils severely dilated before he collapsed at all of his joints. Folken neatly swept him under the knees with one arm while supporting his back with the other and gathered him into his arms.

"Dilandau, I will discuss this with you later."

Folken was obviously not amused on their usual levels of mutual hate and insubordination. Dilandau watched him irately—prey stolen and given sanctuary, goddamn fucking bastard—then jerked his head toward a far door.

"Fine, get out with your precious lab rat, _Folken. I have no interest in him anyway."_

"I think that you have something to discuss with _us right __now," said Foruma._

The Sorcerers were standing on the hangar floor and watching with passive amusement. Folken turned a half-step to face them, coolly stared Foruma down, and walked the opposite direction. A dark patch of blood had already spread across the back of his head.

A side door hissed closed after him.

"…hm."

"Stubborn bastard. Think we should cut his antibiotics supply until he complies with us?"

"His infection's cleared up already, Kuaru."

"Damn it. Well, unless he gets another one for ending belly-up on the floor. Bloody bastard."

"Literally."

"Kuaru, Paruchi, that will do."

Foruma watched the door for a moment, then turned on his heel and walked back up the gangplank, the other three Sorcerers falling in step behind him.

---------------

Chesta sighed audibly and leapt down from his Alseides. Dilandau was staring at the door through which the Sorcerers had left atop the gangplank.

He was shaking.

"My lord? Sir?"

Dilandau did not respond. Chesta sighed and walked around to face Dilandau.

Dilandau was clenching his fists and his teeth neurotically. His entire body was wracking. Sweat uncaused by the battle was beginning to form at his temples, running the small hairs by his ears to stick to the sides of his face.

"…Dilandau-sama? Are you all right?"

Dilandau released his teeth with what could only be called a bark, spun on his heel, and, still shaking and clenching his fists until his leather gauntlets creaked, marched to a manually operated side door—chosen probably on the premise alone that he could slam it, which he did.

Loudly.

Chesta watched the door as if expecting Dilandau to return long enough to smack him or give him some random blame for the situation. After moments of silence so potent that it reverberated in the acoustics of the hangar, he sighed and climbed back into his Alseides to dock it properly.


	5. Halo 05: Doom in a Capsule

**Halo 05: Doom in a Capsule**

"YAAAAAAAY! I'M A PONY!"

"No, you're not, GIR. Now get off of that."

"YA-HA!"

"GIR! Argh…"

Zim snapped frontward in his seat and buried his head in his hand, elbow on the ship dashboard, the other arm draped deceptively languidly across the controls. GIR was jumping around the cargo hold in one of his usual fits of mania.

This would not be such a problem if the cargo hold was underneath the ship, as it was in all proper Irken commuter crafts. Therefore, GIR and Zim's precious cargo of three Earthling personal computers (which were sliding around the 'cargo hold' dangerously and slamming into walls with any deviation in velocity) were all in the cabin. They would be comfortably nestled together for an estimated full Earth season. Though Zim knew this would happen well in advance, he still elected to use his designed-for-speed mini-cruiser in hope that he could get back to Irk in perhaps three months instead of six. Six more months of the Doom Song would be his end.

It had been ten minutes since liftoff.

Zim clenched his forehead until his hand seized up and slipped off of his skin, then pounded the dashboard with his fist. The ship responded with a vehement series of beeps.

"GIR! HOW MANY TIMES TO I HAVE TO TELL YOU—"

"Yahooooooo! All right!"

"Argh." Zim half-closed his eyes and stared straight out the window. "I guess that Ritalin solution I used to wash his central processing unit did absolutely nothing…"

"HEY-YEAH! I'M ALL RIGHT! I'M-A-MARIO!"

"No, you are GIR, and you are going to sit down—" Zim pointed to the seat next to him. "—and be silent for the entire trip back to Irk. Are we clear on this?"

GIR did not respond. After ten seconds of silence during which Zim's already-tight nerves experienced a mounting of apprehension, he turned around.

GIR was happily tapping on a keyboard with a blunt fore-appendage and making small noises of amazement. 

_Did he plug that thing into the ship's power supply all by himself? I left it hooked up as it was on—waitaminute…_

"GIR! Step away from that NOW!"

GIR looked up at Zim, smiled vacantly with his tongue lolling, and pointed at the screen. "I found us some music."

"NO, GIR. That's Irken experimental evidence-property now, specially requested by the Tallest themselves…wait…"

Zim turned around fully in his seat. "Are you getting internet access up here?"

"Uh-huh!"

"With that POS satellite we got out of the dumpster at Computer Shack?"

"Yup!" GIR clicked on something. His mouth contracted into a funnel. "OOOH…"

"How can—that's impossible—it didn't work on _Earth when we were just yards away from a _radio tower_—"_

"SONG DONE! SONG DONE!"

GIR double-clicked clumsily on something, then watched the screen with rapt attention.

The "Macarena" started.

"NO! NO NO NO!"

"YAY! DANCE PARTY!"  
"NO! GIR, WE ARE ON _BUSINESS_! BU-SI-NESS! AND THAT IS PROPERTY OF THE IRKEN—"

GIR had already jumped up and was enthusiastically doing his own special version of the "Macarena" with the music, which involved quite a bit of pelvic swirling and leaping around the cabin. 

"—EMPIRACAL GOVERNMENT. NO!"

GIR jumped onto the newest CPU and did a rendition of the can-can. Zim growled and half-lunged out of his seat.

"Warning," said the ship. "Entering planetary atmosphere. Switching to emergency landing mode."

"W-what?"

"YE-HAW! I'M DANCING! SHOW ME YOUR HOTTEST MOVES! UH-HUH UH-HUH UH-HUH!"

Zim turned around to leave GIR to perform rather suggestive thrusting motions in the air and scanned all of the data flashing across his control panel. The data clearly indicated that they were entering the upper atmosphere of a planet of magnitude comparable to that of the Earth, and that they would not be able to pull out of its gravitational field.

The only problem was that there was no planet in front of them.

"Um… computer!" Zim typed several commands into the computer. "What is this nonsense about a _planet_?"

The computer clicked and rechecked its data.

"The data is not in error. There is, in fact, a planet in front of us, and we are about to land on it."

When the computer spoke in clear terms, it was obviously feeling resentful of being piloted by something so blind. Irkens were like humans; they relied on their sight as the ultimate indicator of truth.

"Besides, can you not feel the pull and turbulence on the ship?"

"I can, but…" Zim pushed himself up onto his arms and leaned across to the window. He saw nothing. "Are you sure this isn't a black hole?"

"Negative."

"ZOOT ZOOT ZOOT! BEEP!"

Zim ignored GIR's launch into some version of "Night of Fire" and swiveled his head around, checking all angles of visible space for any sign of a planet. The Earth was not far behind him, and they were not nearly close enough to the moon for any sort of interference yet—

The ship hit a second layer of atmosphere. The ship jerked dangerously.

A planet appeared the second that the ship removed through an almost reflexive layer of atmosphere. The land below was richly forested and spotted with grasslands that looked exactly like Earth vegetation from this vantage…

Zim blinked. He blinked again. He removed his eyes from their sockets and replaced them, then blinked vigorously.

"What the HELL?"

Zim grabbed the edge of the control panel as the ship jerked again and began a zigzag barrel toward the land. "COMPUTER! Where are we? Is this Earth?"

"The data reports negative."

"Then _where_? This isn't on a single Intergalactic Federation chart!"

"The computer has concluded that this planet is… uncharted."

"Uncharted? A new discovery?"

The music died with a sickening crunch as the computers and GIR slammed into one side of the ship. Zim was thrown from his seat and into a side locker.

"AAAAAAH!"

"WEEE! WE'RE FALLING! WE'RE GONNA DIE!"

Zim pulled himself back upright. Flames were licking over the windshield, a normal occurrence during any reentry. The cabin was growing hot.

The ship was nose-diving into a forest.

"………AAAAAAAAAAH!!"

"WOOOOOOOOOO!"

-----------------------------

Dalet pulled another pair of wire-cutters out of the small toolkit he had broken open by his leg and squeezed them to break the film of rust that had formed over the gears. He was sitting on a tree next to the wounded shoulder of his Alseides, just outside the burning city. The others had already set off for the Vione. Dalet had made up an excuse about being unable to fly his Alseides back without fixing the error – something about the flight levers being broken or something else, mumblemumble, so I'll see you back at the base after you report to Dilandau-sama – so now he was stuck trying to make it look as if he had actually made progress on something that needed to be fixed in the hangar anyway.

_This isn't safe._

Dalet brushed sweat off of his brow with the gauntleted back of his hand and looked toward the violent red and orange flames several miles away, now sharply contrasting with the blackening sky. The metal stuck to his skin as he rubbed it with a paradoxical form of friction that came from the damp and the slick.

_The entire damn forest is probably going to go up in flames. Shit… Rather be here right now, though. Chesta can play the hero and be messenger-boy today._

Dalet returned to work and tried to debate with the guilt-worm that was now gnawing at his insides. He had a mixed record with the worm. He often won his debates in the name of practicality and the fact that people can care for themselves, but at the times when it was fiercest it was particularly stubborn.

Dalet stopped working for a second and listened to the forest. Over the distant crackling and intermittent collapse of a building he thought that he could hear a distant, high-velocity whining, growing closer.

He shrugged and returned to his work until the whining reached such levels that it was difficult to ignore. He draped his wrist over his leg, still loosely grasping the wire-cutters, and tilted his head.

The whining reached dynamics often associated with low-flying jets. 

Dalet plugged his ears and looked up.

A fireball shot across the treetops, knocking liberal showers of leaves down into Dalet's area. Dalet screwed his eyes shut against the light and the noise, feeling the faint rain of scorching flora. The fireball's whine crashed into a nearby clearing.

Dalet clutched the tree as the forest shook. The silence that followed was absolute.

Dalet opened his eyes and brushed the leaves off of his shoulders and hair. White smoke was pouring out of the clearing; something industrial was hissing and spitting in anger.

"…whoa…"

Dalet jumped out of the tree with practiced grace and ran into the clearing.

A violet and magenta contraption consisting entirely of spheroid components had its nose buried in the now-scorching loam. White, fluffy coolant was spurting out of several robotic arms that extended from the undercarriage, thoroughly coating the contraption until it became no more recognizable than a snow drift.

Dalet hesitated and sniffed the air. The coolant smelled familiar and clinical, not at all foreign. He slowly drew his sword with a scrape against the sheath and began to circle with a sideways, crossing-ankles motion.

"All right." He cleared his throat. "If you be friends of the Zaibach Empire, show yourself now and state your case. I am an elite solider from the Dragonslayer unit. I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me."

A hatch slammed open, spattering the clearing with foam. GIR poked his head out of the cruiser.

He grinned.

"HI!"

Dalet blinked. "Uh… hi…"

GIR climbed out of the cruiser happily, humming the Macarena to himself in a 'do-do-doo' fashion. He ran up to Dalet and tilted his head.

"…hey, Macarena! WOO! HOW'YA DOIN?"

GIR stood on the tips of his proverbial toes and waved. Dalet stared down at this new visitor.

_Well, it seems friendly enough._

"I'm… doing fine. How are you doing?"

GIR thought about this for a moment.

"…MACARENA! WOO!"

"…Ma-ca-re-na. All right. Macarena. You spoke a little SNG a moment ago."

"SNG?"

"Standard New Gaean. It's the language in my country and most of the countries now. You must be from around here, or you're some sort of artificial-intelligence creature with translation abilities."

"…I like apples."

"Oh, that's cool." Dalet sheathed his sword and kneeled down. He offered his hand. "Well, uh… My name is Dalet Kaine, and…uh… I am a soldier in the Zaibach Army. Who are you and what are you doing here? You're… uh… well, you're sort of encroaching on a secret operation right now."

"GIR! Get away from that alien-creature!"

Zim climbed out of the open hatch, slid down the side of the cruiser, and marched over to Dalet. He stopped and put his hands on his hips, drawing himself up to his full height and puffing his chest with air.

His full height stood to Dalet's chest when Dalet was on one knee.

"Greetings, Alien-Creature. I am ZIM, a representative of the Irken Empire, and I seem to have crash-landed on your planet with a rather odd reflective atmosphere that has prohibited my sensors from seeing its whereabouts."

"…uh…"

"You are not charted on any of my maps, therefore, you are not a member of the Federation. You look like an Earth-Creature. Are you a colony of the Earth? Slave, perhaps?"

"…the what? Hey… Did you ask if I was a slave?"

"Your planet really needs to look into altering that reflexive atmosphere. It's dangerous, quite frankly, and because of it I have been severely delayed in my journey to report important evidence to my government."

"…_WHAT_?"

"Now, Alien-Creature, what do you call yourself? I know that you speak my language, so you must respond or the protocol of the Federation concerning non-Federation creatures states that I must—"

"Excuse me." Dalet narrowed his eyes. "In the first place, I think you're fucking nuts, and in the second place, if I am not a part of any sort of Federation, I am not subject to its laws. You hold no jurisdiction over me because of what your organization says, savvy?"

"_Dare_ you try to mock me?"

"Yeah. If you didn't understand me in the first place, I basically said that you can suck my balls if you don't like what I do and do not tell you."

"Aha! So, you are a male-creature! GIR! I won the bet!"

"Aw…"

"Bet?"

"I thought you were a preee-ty la-dy," said GIR, twisting his toe on the ground with his hands behind his back.

"Oh, for… I'm used to it. But don't my shoulders—"

Zim tapped Dalet's shoulder armor. "Hidden by this nonsense. I thought you were compensating for something."

"Hey, if I were a woman I'd show it off with that really revealing useless armor, all right?"

"And as far as ball-sucking goes, ah, yes, I know all about your ball-sucking. It is an Earthling habit. Zim does not engage in such things. It is LEWD and—"

"Wanna computer?"

"—what?"

Zim looked over his shoulder. GIR had at some point darted off and was now hauling the newest CPU out of the cruiser by its chords, pulling them over his shoulder and using his back for support. Half of the chords had already come detached from the strain, and more were getting close to that point.

One of the pin-screwed chords snapped off.

Zim's jaw dropped open in horror.

"NO! NONONONONONONONO GIR!! NO!"

Zim ran toward the cruiser waving his arms just as GIR dropped over the side, panting. The CPU fell on top of him with a sickening crunch.

The shell broke open, spilling the inner cards and workings onto the forest loam.

"…NO!"

GIR wormed out from under the computer and poked around through the damaged innards of the computer. "I've got dancing music in here somewhere…"

"Um…" Dalet pointed at the computer, mouth still half-open from its initial reaction to the drop. "What is that?"

GIR help up the Ethernet card triumphantly. "I found my file!"

"NO! GIR, that is _not a file! Put it down!"_

"Aw… I wanted to dance with my new friend..."

Zim snatched the card from GIR and kneeled before the fallen computer, trying to salvage what he could from the dirt and stick it into slots. He blew dust and bits of dead vegetation off of the cards and brushed more of the same matter out of the inside of the computer.

Dalet hovered over his shoulder, watching the workings carefully. Emerald green cards encrusted with gold and silver runes and workings, all in slots, tapes and wires running about inside the box. It was a technology he had never seen, though its workings seemed somehow familiar.

"What is this thing?"

Zim brushed him away. "None of your business, Transvestite-Man. It is an Earthling tool for communication and establishing the base and menial tasks of creative writing and playing video games, a small-minded amusement indeed. It is the basis of their modern society, which is why we are taking these three CPU units back to Irk to—and WHY am I telling you this?"

Dalet shrugged. "You started it, Green Man."

"And how old are you, anyway? You're not a man! You're a boy!"

"I'm almost sixteen, thank you very much."

"Hm… the age of the height of Earth adolescence, crazy. Hm… yes…Tell me, boy, are you adolescent?"

"My name is Dalet Kaine, and yes, I am."

"Success! I have found a missing link of Earth to the rest of the galaxies!"

"But we're as isolated as any other planet. Isn't Earth an old term for the Mystic Moon?"

"Um… yeah-sure-whatever, kid. Look…" Zim dropped a hard drive into the computer with a small crash and turned to Dalet. "I really need to get going, and I'm going to chart your pathetic excuse for a hellhole of a planet on my charts as 'Zimdom'. I'll probably be back to conquer it someday." Zim sniffed the air and looked toward Fanelia. "Is something _burning_?"

Dalet gave Zim a flat look. "You just noticed?"

"My mind has been on more important things. Now listen." Zim got into Dalet's face. "You must not tell a SOUL about my existence or this evening, do you understand me? Your very life depends on it."

Dalet flicked Zim's forehead with his forefinger. Zim clutched his forehead and staggered backwards into the computer.

"Right, squirt."

"A-WEEE!"

"Not NOW, GIR!"

"Hey!" GIR yelled from inside the ship. "Let's bribe him! Bribe him!"

"WHAT?"

"I dunno, it's like… 'BRIBE BRIBE!' on TV and stuff. Doesn't that work?"

"Hm…" Zim leaned back against the computer. "You know… for once, you might have a good idea, GIR."

"If you're going to do that, I'll take your ship off your hands for you."

"Out of the question." Zim stomped toward the ship. "Here…"

Dalet waited as Zim hauled an entire computer, monitor, speakers, a printer, a mouse, a keyboard, a satellite, and a mass tangle out of his ship and set it on the ground at Dalet's feet. He followed Zim's progress in utter confusion.

_What in the hell is all of this stuff?_

"Here." Zim slammed a heavy Ziploc bag of manuals on top of the CPU. "Everything you need to know. The satellite never worked worth anything, and the thing runs on Windows 98 SE. May your non-atheist perception of a divine deity have mercy on your soul."

"…huh?"

"In exchange for your silence. Take this gift as a token of Irken friendship."

"…" Dalet picked up the satellite and hefted it. He looked at it from various angles.

"It runs on electricity. You have that, don't you?" 

"Of course. We're the most advanced country in the world."

"Good. Be careful with it, don't clank it around, follow the manuals, 'a' equals 'b' and so forth." Zim marched back toward his fallen CPU and stared to haul it back into the ship.

"Remember our promise, Dalet-Creature. Nothing about Irk. Perhaps if you are true to your promise I will reward you richly when I return to take over this miserable little planet."

"Okay. Sure."

Zim hauled the computer into the hatch.

"BYE!" 

GIR waved enthusiastically. Dalet waved back vaguely, a smile starting to grow.

"GIR!" 

Zim pulled GIR into the cruiser and slammed the hatch.

Dalet stared at the cruiser. He looked down at the satellite in his hands and hefted it once again.

"Tool for modern communication, huh…"

"ARGH!"

Dalet jumped and stared at the spaceship. The hatch burst open once again, and Zim climbed out wearing a welding mask and lugging a box of tools that looked as if it weighed more than he did.

"…" Zim flipped his mask up. "What are you still doing here?"

"Um… nothing."

Zim flipped his mask back over his face, kneeled, and proceeded to weld his damaged craft with a blue flame. Dalet watched him for a moment.

"Do you need any—"

"No. This is a job for Irken Invaders only. You don't know my ship."

"…all right." Dalet paused. "Thanks."

"You're welcome, now scat."

Dalet set the satellite on top of the CPU and carefully lifted both of them, the satellite sliding around on top of the CPU and forcing Dalet to constantly rebalance his grip and tilt the box to center it.

_Holy shit, this is so cool. I can't wait to get home and see what this does—argh—this is heavy—no, don't fall! …there… _

_…I wonder what Migel is going to think about all of this…_

-----------------------

_You've really done it to yourself this time, Folken._

Folken stared at his reflection in a clear patch of the steam-frosted mirror and gently touched the wound over a large knot in the back of his head. He winced. It was going to give him hell for a while. He had suspected a mild concussion and had lain down in his room with all of the lights off and the fan running after he had secured the captive young man in his lab where, hopefully, the Sorcerers would not find him or dare to tread.

_And I don't know what gives you that idea. They stormed on the ship under my jurisdiction and demanded evidence. Seem to think that I am ungrateful for all they have taught me. I paid their due several times over already. Aah…_

A wave of pain blinded him momentarily, pushing behind his eyes. Folken closed his eyes and waited for the wave to subside. 

The edge of the sink grated under his claws.

_Damn it._ Folken opened his eyes and examined the new minute scores in the porcelain. Nobody had access to his bathroom but himself, and he really didn't care about the appearance anyway so long as it was clean. The brief wave of irritation subsided.

_I just seem to mangle everything that I touch…_

The steam had entirely cleared from the mirror by now. Folken sighed and examined his reflection once again. He was only wearing a blue towel around his waist, and his hair was still wet, unstyled with the liberal amounts of gel (and needless time, one reason that made him wonder why he even bothered) that it took to form it into spikes and was, instead, hanging in his eyes. He had scrubbed the blood out of his hair in the shower, which at least made him look considerably less ill.

_It shouldn't remind me as much of my old self as it does. I look completely different than I did ten years ago._

For one thing, there was that damned bionic arm that remained in the back of his mind until he started this sort of analysis, at which point it caught his eye before his own face did. He was also much taller. He blinked and focused on the mirror image of the person staring back at him. Without the flare of his purple cosmetics he looked plain, though the purple tearmark was still etched under his right eye. Long face, plain features, no expression. He was of the opinion that he was not at all attractive, though Naria and Eriya always had things to say about his appealing qualities. He had often wondered if they were blind or flattering him.

_Well, yes, they're cats; perhaps they have different sensibilities about what is and is not attractive. And why the hell am I standing here analyzing my own levels of relative 'attractiveness'? Oh, by the way, in case you forgot, you just burned the capitol of your former country to the ground and slaughtered the citizens. Why don't you dwell on that instead?_

Wasting time like this always made him feel as if he was doing that by the meaning of the term –_wasting_ time – though he always had more of it to waste than he thought that he did. It somehow made him feel less guilty to sit in front of a stack of paperwork and stare at it,  half-daydreaming for two hours, than to go off and do something of his own interest and come back to achieve the same volume of work.

"Psychology is not as logical as I would like."

"The look on your face tells me that you're being too hard on yourself again, Master."

The second voice was raspy and almost nasal. Folken spun around and clasped sink behind him, managing to keep his look of surprise to a bare minimum. He took a silent breath.

"… Zongi, how long have you been in the wall?" Veins in his ears were still throbbing against what he would be willing to bet was his eardrums if he didn't already know better.

"I just got here, Master."

Zongi was lying, and they both knew it. Folken straightened and fought the urge to cross his arms defensively. 

"Come out. It's all right."

Zongi emerged from the still-wet tiled wall behind the shower glass and walked through the remnants of water, stepped over the edge of the shower, and stood in font of Folken, slumping as he always did to make their actual equality in height less prevalent. He never tried to appear even remotely taller than his master. He thought it was grave disrespect. Folken had given up telling him to stand up straight. He was shrouded in his mantle, weakly clasping the hems as if expecting to need to shield his face from some sort of assault or, more likely, a piercing stare.

"I give you my most grievous apology and beg your humble forgiveness, Master. I was merely…"

Zongi couldn't seem to find a good answer for what he was 'merely' doing, other than watching Folken take a shower. Folken stared at him and was glad that he was wearing a towel, though it didn't make much difference anyway. Zongi had already seen what he wanted to see.

"Zongi, I know that I gave you permission to follow me around at times, but could you please not follow me in here for any reason?"

"Once again, I am most—"

"Don't be sorry. Just keep this in mind. I do have a want of privacy." _Or a dire need for it._

"As you wish, Master. I will never violate your privacy again."

"Thank you."

Folken had a feeling that this was not the first time Zongi had observed his showers. He felt an odd, loss-of-gravity sensation in the pit of his stomach and remembered the last time he had even made a weak attempt at masturbation before growing disgusted with himself and giving up. That was one of the last things on earth he wanted anybody to even know about. He wanted to see if he could take his mind off himself for any period of time, but it was a futile attempt, and he knew it. He had just ended up getting embarrassed and clenching his good hand behind his back while reprimanding himself for being so silly about something that was 'normal'.

"…there was a reason I came in here, originally. I have a message from Sorcerer Garufo. He wants to talk to you. He said that he'll meet you on the main deck at 18:00 hours."

Folken brought his awareness back to current realities and glanced into Zongi's eyes. He saw his own reflection in the translucent, green glass.

"…thank you. Tell him I will meet with him."

Zongi stood awkwardly for a moment as if wanting to say something more, but stopped himself.

"What, Zongi?"

"Nothing. I just still feel bad, Master. Um… do your wounds still pain you? Do you want me to get painkillers or ice or something?"

Folken sighed. "Don't worry about it, Zongi. Just allow me to get dressed."

Zongi bowed and mumbled some form of an affirmative before backing into the tiled wall. Folken sighed heavily and turned back to the mirror. His hair was already drying, which was the best time to start spiking it, but…

Folken looked at the closed canister of gel on the side of the sink for a moment.

_I still don't know why I even bother…_

-----------

_He can't defeat me. He can't defeat me. He can't defeat me… HOW? This doesn't make any fucking sense!_

Dilandau ground his teeth as he took laps around the guymelef hangars with his Dragonslayers, stripped down to his violet undershirt and black pants but still wearing red boots that sharply contrasted with the soft hues of his outfit. Silver hair was dashing into his face without his coronet to hold it out of his eyes. It was a minor annoyance that he had learned how to ignore.

His mind wasn't in the current reality anyway, such as it was.

_Am I not the greatest and most fearsome soldier in the entire empire? The leader of the very elite? I could fell any of my men in one fell swoop, and yet I'm challenged by some ratty refugee with knives that aren't fit for a butcher. Hell, had Folken not interfered I would have gut him like a dog. _

Dilandau turned a sharp corner and growled to himself, not from physical exertion, but from utter loathing. These laps were nothing to him. He took a numb notice of his dog tags inside his shirt beating rhythmically against his chest and then bouncing to the inside of the fabric.

_Shit, I should be in a good mood. I just watched Folken-fucking-Fanel take a nose dive down a flight of stairs and end up belly-up with a crack up his skull, then learned that his superiors are here to tag on his ass and make his life a living hell. Then this fucking prisoner has to come along and ruin my day, and now Dalet's fucking late with 'mechanical problems', whatever the hell that means. When he gets back I'm going to make him wish his mother had never spawned him._

The thought of whaling on Dalet only sent a momentary mental flash of some sort of silver lining to this cloud, but as always it was only a minor distraction and an output for his aggression that could never be satisfied without seeing his enemy's head on a spike. 

_Johnny C. Johnny C. Johnnnnnny…_

That pale, cadaverous excuse for a head, hollows under eyes smeared with black makeup, ratty hair, beady eyes, toothpick of a body. Snap. Snap. Snap. Every limb should snap like timber. Such a skinny, pathetic runt. And what the hell was all of that intellectual crap he was spouting? 

One of Dilandau's numerous pet peeves was intellectuals. If he had his way, they would all be locked into rooms doing that for which they were truly useful: making weapons of mass destruction for his use. At least they had more use than politicians, who were only good for moving target practice and technique dummies to show his men how to better kill people.

Another of the aforementioned peeves was people who didn't lie down and die when he commanded them to do so. Then there were the so-called 'gothics', all of them depressed and spouting shit about how they wanted to die, and nothing else. This Johnny looked like one of them. As far as Dilandau was concerned, they should all do the world a favor and jump off a cliff. Shouldn't it make them happy if they wanted to die? Everybody would win.

The repressed pants of his Dragonslayers were beginning to burst through the barriers of their masters' trachea more intermittently. Dilandau snorted. They knew damn well that if any of them showed any signs of even remote fatigue, he would make examples. This was a light exercise for the elite. Ten russas was nothing.

_Johnny. Johnny. Johnny. _

Dilandau's thoughts floated back into the red haze. The bastard had to die, and painfully, as an example; there was no other option. Chesta had seen his defeat, and by now surely the story had spread through his troops. Yes, this Johnny had to die in front of them all so as to kill any ideas that he might be anything less than perfect.

_It wasn't a defeat. Hell, it ended in a draw. And didn't Johnny lose more than you did because he allowed Folken to grab him? If I were in that position I would have had the instinct to dodge attacks from either direction._

_Yes… yes, this is more the natural order of things. I keep telling myself this. Technically, you won._

Dilandau grinned, but faltered as soon as he remembered the faint cut on his collarbone. It would heal without any problems, but it was proof that his enemy had touched him. His enemy had drawn blood when he had drawn none.

_…shit. Shit. Shit. Shit…_

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

The Dragonslayers stopped as their master drew his sword and madly attacked a wall, hacking, slicing, and yelling--short barks and yells, then roars--showering sparks all over the metal lattice gangplank. Through the haze it was Johnny… Johnny… subjects of aggression, smirking at him, the words, Chesta saw him, Chesta saw him…

Dilandau's strained and worked against the wall, already beginning to glisten. Droplets of sweat scattered from the tips of his hair. He barred his teeth and roared at the wall, took one last slash at the wall, and threw his sword at it.

Panting echoed in the deep chamber.

Dilandau clenched his fists until his nails dug furrows in his palms and collapsed to his knees, ignoring the ribbons of blood running down his curled fingers. His harsh breathing began to slow.

The mist began to lift.

"Lord Dilandau?"

Gatti. Gatti was behind him. Dilandau didn't face his soldier and instead focused on a point in the depths of the chamber through one of the regular holes in the gangplank floor. _Holes. Hollows in eyes. Holes for eyes._

"What, Gatti?"

 "…Dalet just arrived in the main hangar, sir."

Dilandau thought about this for a moment. He could feel Gatti tense behind him, though he was one of the very few who would not show outright fear. He sighed and stood up, pressing bloody palms into the gangplank and ignoring the blood that dripped through the metal weave, thick metal rope woven into a pattern with diamond-shaped spaces. He would not be surprised to see his wounds turn black with the filth on the surface.

"All right. The rest of you, keep running until I get back. No slowing." Dilandau took a few steps toward the door and stopped. "And I don't think I ever told you to stop in the first place. Do not think that I will forget."

There was a dull chorus of affirmatives. Dilandau lifted his heavy, metal-plated jacket off of the chair by the door and shrugged it over his shoulders, not even bothering to pull on the sleeves. It was too bloody hot for the leather nonsense.

Dalet was just getting out of his Alseides when Dilandau reached the hangar, pulling some ivory-toned object out of the cockpit of his melef and replacing it as soon as he heard footsteps on the gangplank. Dilandau arched his eyebrows.

_And what in the hell has Dalet found this time?_

"Dalet, you're late."

Dalet snapped to attention and remained motionless as Dilandau walked down the stairs to the foot of the melef. The Dragonslayer was clenching his jaw and already had a thin trail of sweat running from his temples hidden somewhere behind that sheet of hair. _Ooh, he knows he's in trouble…_

"Technical problems, I heard?"

"Um… yes, sir."

"I see." Dilandau touched the deep score in the melef's armor where gears and a belt were clearly visible. "Oh my, this is even worse than what Chesta did to his melef. Tell me, did those backwater hicks give you trouble?"

"No, sir."

"Did a little fairy do this, then?"

"Yes. I mean, no, sir. It was the dragon, sir. It's magical, sir."

"Yes, I know. I already got a full report." Dilandau continued to examine the melef. "You know, I honestly don't give a flying fuck about the dragon, Dalet. However, I do care about the state of these Alseides units."

"…sir."

"What?"

"Yes, sir."

"We just had them painted, you know."

"Yes, sir."

"Redone, refurbished. These are the newest models."

"Yes, sir."

"And you went and ruined it in some little hick republic run by an infant king with melefs that are old enough to belong in a museum."

"Yes, sir."

"Are you the elite, Dalet?"

"Yes, sir."

"Say that again. Are you the elite, Dalet?"

"…yes, sir."

Dilandau stared at Dalet. Something about his tone was antagonizing. "…get down here."

Dalet jumped off of the cockpit platform. Dilandau grabbed him by the collar, kneed him in the stomach, and threw him onto the ground. The Slayer collapsed and gagged. 

Dilandau kicked Dalet in face. Dalet landed on his back.

"I don't like your attitude, Dalet." 

Dilandau paced around his supine victim and watched the expressions on Dalet's face with mild boredom. Dalet's face was twisted in pain and already bleeding from the mouth and nose, though he was trying his hardest to control his expressions. 

"Aw. It's a shame to wound such a pretty face." Dilandau ground his heel into Dalet's bruised stomach. Dalet retched and gasped.

"Aren't you shaming yourself? You're ruining your face because you can't do a job properly."

Dalet gagged. Dilandau dug his heel in harder. "I asked you a question."

"….y…yes…"

"I made you commander, you know, and you shamed me and my entire operation. You've slandered my reputation as a judge of ability. Oh, don't worry. Chesta got his reward as well. But you were late." Dilandau smiled slowly. "I remember your enthusiasm about being appointed to such a high office. Oh, don't worry, it will never happen again. But you failed as a commander, and as such, you will pay penalties fitting for your office."

Dalet gasped shakily. The air was being crushed out of his lungs through his diaphragm. Dilandau lifted his heel off of Dalet's chest and hauled the Slayer upright by his collar once again.

"Do you see that mud on the melef right there? Do you? Nod. Good boy. Remember what I said? You do?" Dilandau's voice was almost comforting. "Well, no worries, Dalet, you'll keep a toothbrush. Oh, you'll need it. You're going to lick it off. All of it."

Dalet looked shocked by this. Beatings were routine, but this sort of punishment involving disgust more than physical pain was a rarity. Dilandau knew this. Pain was so much more fun to administer, and dirt disgusted him too much to deal with it anyway in most circumstances. But there were times when the Slayers were such worms that they needed this treatment.

Dilandau dragged Dalet over to the melef and shoved his nose into the small patch of mud. "Come on, now. I haven't got all day."

Dalet gagged and twisted his face away. Dilandau smashed his nose into the melef and felt already broken bones shift. 

Dalet cried out.

"Weakling." Dilandau kicked him in the back. "Get on with it."

Dalet shakily ran the tip of his tongue on the grime and shuddered. Dilandau maintained a firm hold on the back of his neck until he had cleared the area of mud. He finally wretched and vomited.

"…pathetic." Dilandau released Dalet. Dalet barely caught himself on the edge of his melef to keep himself from falling into his own mess. "That is utterly disgusting. Go clean yourself. Never fail me again."

Dalet remained where he was, shaking badly and trying to catch his breath. Dilandau turned his back on the pathetic spectacle, climbed up to the cockpit, and looked in to see just what Dalet was hiding. There were ivory-colored pieces of some sort of technology, though it looked more like junk to him.

"…been out scavenging?"

Dalet did not reply. Dilandau looked down at his bloodied Slayer and snorted.

"Rather sad, really."

Dilandau smashed a speaker against the side of the melef and jumped off. He walked to the stairs.

"Dinner in half an hour. Either show up clean or don't show up at all. I don't want to see your face at all; at least don't make it disgust me more than it already does at the moment."

---------

Jazzing for legality. We all know that _Invader Zim is not mine. That, like the wonderful __JTHM, belongs to Jhonen Vasquez. I'm ripping him off a lot._

Windows 98 SE, for the bloody hell of it, is not 'mine' either, and I'm glad it's not.


	6. Halo 06: The Impossible Alchemy

**Halo 06: The Impossible Alchemy**

"This is the place?"

"It's a rather delightful hole-in-the-wall I frequent when I'm in the area. Come on; don't tell me that you don't get out more often. This is popular with the kids your age."

Folken looked at the restaurant nudged into the lower floors of the Astorian town's working class district. The district was entirely mud-brick and alleyways, every building being surmounted by a tin chimney spouting white or soot smoke, the latter of which carbon-flashed the walls to contrast with the lower swaths of clay close to the road.

It was a hell of a lot more pleasant than the _Vione_, at any rate.

"I seldom have time on my hands."

A ball rolled into Folken's boot and bounced off gently, followed soon by a scampering girl in a torn dress and braids. The girl stooped to get her ball, stopped, and looked up in something bordering awe and fear.

Folken felt a twinge in his stomach. _These are the sorts of people whose lives I want to fix, more or less. I don't blame her for being scared._

The girl backed off a little bit and waited patiently for the man to either send her scampering or offer her the ball.

"Hey, come on!" called Garufo from within the restaurant entryway.

Folken knelt down, dragging his cloak even further in the dust, and offered the girl her ball with his living hand. The girl looked up and twirled her foot on its toe's axis behind her.

"Here." _Do you have dreams you will never have fulfilled, little one? I wish I was your age once again…_

_…Van…_

The girl snatched the ball, waited for a shy moment, and then ran off to join her waiting play party. Folken watched her numbly, lost in random thoughts, until Garufo pulled his shoulder.

"I can't leave you alone for a second. The second you go off duty your head launches back into the clouds. Come on, come on…"_  
_Garufo lead Folken into the dark, grease-aired tavern and settled into a corner table. There was a window filled with a cut of yellowish, thick glass, though it was so discolored by years of smoke and grime that it provided only light and not view of the outside. 

"This is the stuff that makes you have heart attacks by the time you're thirty. Entirely fat and grease, though I have to stick to a herbavoric diet most of the time. Don't take your youth for granted. Someday you'll wish you could eat like a university student every day."

"Hm."

"Oh, come on, some day you'll be a pot-bellied old man; you might as well eat up while you can. You're too flat-stomached as it is anyway."

"I don't particularly like the former idea."

"Oh, I know. Nobody does. Rather depressing."

"You will say that I am petite next, I assume."

"I am not going that far. Evening, Annie."

Garufo commenced into relaxed salutations with the waitress, who appeared to be of university age and had a mass of red, curly hair tied back from her face. Folken interlaced his fingers in front of his mouth and rested his chin on his thumbs, noting the waitresses' expression upon seeing his metal claws and her smooth gloss over the momentary shock, moving her eyes from his hands and back to Garufo. 

_She must be used to this sort of thing in here. Quite a mixed crowd._

Annie left. Garufo pulled his cigarette case out of his shirt pocket and opened the tin, selecting a new tube and lighting it with the large candle set on the tabletop. It was the sort of candle that people made and displayed as novelties: a huge affair lodged into an old bottle over which copious amounts of wax had flowed and molded. The Sorcerer was wearing civilian clothes of a blue tunic with the characteristic Zaibachian / Mandarin collar and leather breeches, keeping his various necessary implements of trade hooked on a heavy belt around his thin hips.

At the moment, he was the Gaean equivalent of a doctor in golf clothes.

Folken was still fully dressed in his uniform.

"You're crazy," said Garufo, taking a deep drag of his cigarette. "Off duty and you're still wearing that infernal vinyl nonsense. Aren't you burning up under there?"

"You read my mind."

"Well, if you're hot, take off your cloak. Nobody's going to care about your arm. You don't need to hide it from the world. It makes a great story. Just a medical accident; no need for any shame."

"No; I was speaking of the fact that I was thinking about our relative states of attire."

"That too. Synchronicity, or is that telepathic sub-communication, do you think? The best examples crop up in everyday exchange. Or maybe your eyes were just roving in the right spots over my clothes."

"Perhaps you should start a course at the university."

"Yeah, sit around and chat about everything and nothing. Sounds like a great way to dissect the world. None of this artificial theory and a choked lab environment in which we can't say what's right in front of our noses without a million proofs and a formal data chart."

Folken smiled. Garufo blew out smoke at a respectful angle away from Folken's face and chuckled. "See, it doesn't hurt you at all to lighten up a little bit. You're not a common fool all of a sudden. All of that knowledge crammed into that head didn't fly out through your pores as soon as those muscles for smiling tightened."

"Are you so sure about that?"

"Who knows? We'll postulate. Write a theory." 

Garufo laughed. Annie walked over briskly and set two tankards on the tabletop, stopping momentarily to catch Folken's eye and smile at him before pivoting around a palm rested on the table and walking off.

Folken blinked.

_Did… did she just make a pass at me?_

"Well, well…" Garufo watched Annie disappear behind saloon doors into the kitchen and blew a stream of smoke into the air, sitting at such a sidesaddle angle that his back was to the wall. "I think somebody has taken a small fancy to you."

Folken slunk behind his hands until his forehead rested on the sides of his curled fingers and sighed. "She has poor taste."

"Nonsense. You wouldn't look half bad if you would wash that ridiculous makeup off of your face and stop using half a can of gel to make your hair stand on end. Smiles do wonders as well. So do civilian clothes. This isn't the sort of uniform women die for, you know. You wouldn't look half bad in a shirt and pants for once in your life."

"I have a rather limited wardrobe." _Gods, is he actually giving me advice about this sort of thing?_

"Nah, go shopping. Men's clothes don't cost much, as long as you do not shop in Astoria. Just a tunic and pants is all you need. No need for makeup and bobbles, though you seem to enjoy adorning yourself like a woman. I remember when you came back with those things in your ears and that thing on your face. Infection for a week. That's what you get for going to some parlor in downtown Synheim."

"Hey."

"I meant no offence by it. I don't think even women need that stuff to look beautiful. It's needless adulteration to an already beautiful thing."

"This is based on a very beautiful and antique gothic style."

"Yeah, it's a bunch of kids getting depressed, if you ask me. Never changes. Are you going to drink that?"

Folken looked at the tankard in front of him. "…is this ale?"

"No, beer. Come on; you're a grown man. Drink up. A little bit of the stuff doesn't harm you at all. Just don't do what every other lackwit student does and drown in the stuff. Didn't change even after I showed them the liver videos."

"A little bit doesn't harm you in the same way that smoking benefits your health?"

"You're going to get on my case as well?"

"I'm surprised that such an educated man would voluntarily begin smoking after seeing the copious amounts of research on the subject. Or do black lungs attract women as well?"

"Don't get cocky." Garufo sighed and extinguished the cigarette in a porcelain ashtray that was assumed to be, at one point, white beneath the ashes and burnt surface. "I know I'm going straight to hell one way or another for what I've done. Some go later, some sooner. There's not much more in this life I care to see that I haven't seen or perverted in some manner. So let me have my smoke, all right? Let me be ignorant and do something because it feels good for once. Sorcerers or no, men are still men."

Folken watched the change on Garufo's face. It was not proportional to his sudden change in attitude; contrary, it did not appear to change at all. The younger sorcerer took a small sip of his flagon and rolled the fluid on his tongue. This was not his first time to taste alcohol, but it had always been in the form of wine.

_Twenty-five years old and you haven't ever tasted beer. You really are out of touch. Perspective is a real problem area. _

Folken shook his head for slipping into the mode that convinced him that he needed to compare his status to that of the rest of the world and returned to his automaton state-of-mind. He was an independent variable in a world that formatted to equations; what they did he did not have to balance out socially. He just needed to manipulate them.

Folken swallowed.

"Jaded?"

"I'm old enough to be jaded. You definitely are not." 

Garufo took a deep drink of his beer and thumped the flagon down. He sat back and regarded Folken with the casual calculation that comes becomes fluid and mechanically subconscious with years of use. 

"How old are you? Twenty-four?"

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty-five. You're still a kid to me."

Folken smirked into his drink. "And Foruma."

"Yeah, all of us old has-beens in the circle. You're three-fourths the age of the youngest of us, and you were initiated when you were one quarter less again that age. Lad, you're too young to be jaded and out. You should still be blazing with passion and tilting at windmills, and be taking pride in the fact that you are. There will be plenty of time to be jaded when you get old. I think it is rather healthy to get this post-adolescent depression nonsense out of the way before you see, over years, that there really is something to be depressed about. What you are feeling now is an immeasurable void of knowledge."

"…pardon?"

"Never mind."

"Hm." Folken took another sip. "Despite outward appearances, I am a deeply emotional person who is inclined to tilt at windmills."

"Oh, it's written all over your face. Literally." Garufo smiled. "At least you're wise enough to recognize that in yourself, eh? Come on, you don't sip a beer. You quaff it."

"I have a virgin stomach in this area."

"And a virgin liver to clean it all out."

"I would prefer to keep it that way."

"One drink won't push you over into that land, and you know it. You just don't want to get drunk and speak with a fluidity of discourse that you will come to regret."

"…and?"

"I am just saying. You need to get stuff off of your chest like every other man alive."

Annie set the house's nightly entrée of half-fat-half-meat steaks and potatoes in front of the sorcerers and once again gave Folken an enticing smile. Folken avoided eye contact and feigned interest in the window, muttering 'Thank you'.

After Annie had walked away, Garufo hit Folken on his living arm.

"Ow."

"What's wrong with you? Not interested in women?"

"It is not that."

"She's a great girl, you know. She's working her way through a local university on an art major. Sharp as a tack. Besides, any woman who'll put up with you when you're still in work clothes and looking like a suicidal clown is a keeper in my book."

"That was uncalled for."

"It was truth. If this is one of your shyness issues, I'd be happy to introduce you."

"I would appreciate it if you didn't."

"You're too reserved. You need to get to know people." Garufo cut into his steak. "If you are so inclined upon saving the very wishes of every member of the human race you might want to get to know some on an intimate level. Just as friends, even."

"I am so inclined to aid every member of the race of conscious beings."

"Yes, you are right. Forgive me. You've made friends with doppelgangers and cat hybrids in ways that most humans cannot."

Folken poked at the potatoes and smirked to himself. "Perhaps it truly is not a job for a human."

"Stop that nonsense. Regardless of your lineage you are as much a human in my eyes as the next one."

"The next one of me or the next human?"

"Well, as much as me or—"

"Dilandau Albatou?"

Garufo sighed. "Folken, I am trying to be civil. Let's please not start that again here. The past is past and over. Nothing can be done to alter it."

"I am well aware of this."

"Oh, don't start. You were so positive earlier. Let's go back to that state."

Folken sighed and ate silently. Garufo watched him for a moment and set his utensils down.

"But now that we are on the note of business, I might as well approach the secondary reason I have you here."

"…secondary."

"The primary reason you are out here is so that I can have a talk with my brightest student, whose place ironically I now occupy in stead of his resignation. Example of high irony, isn't it? I worry about you, Folken. But the other issue I must address is that regarding the captive from the Mystic Moon. Don't smirk at me. You knew this was coming all along."

"Yes, I did."

"You don't need him for your fate alteration project, Folken. We have need of him for our own purposes."

"I have seen what you do with captives for your own 'purposes'."

"I would like to remind you that I was not a member of the organization when that mess was started, as you were not. We have moved to other areas of experimentation."

"I see."

"And what use do you have for the captive, might I enquire?"

Folken set his fork down and paused, looking down at his food though maintaining perfect posture. 

"…I am not inclined to disclose that information at this time."

He had no use for the captive as of yet, and he knew it damn well. Sheltering the poor thing was a better option than handing him over to the Sorcerers; that was the only humane thing to do. He trusted only himself to experiment with live subjects anymore, for he, like every other exacting scientist who has ever entered a lab with collogues, has learned the most important rule insofar as experimentation is concerned: if you want something done correctly, you will do it yourself.

"Always the control freak. Every aspect of your life and the lives of everything around you, you feel that you must control. It's going to break you someday." Garufo stared at Folken. "When are you going to start considering your own happiness?"

"My happiness will result directly from the achievement of—"

"Bullshit."

Folken looked up sharply and caught Garufo's stare. He furrowed his eyebrows.

_What?_  
"And before you even start, I know fully well the details of what you plan to implement. From the beginning of time, particles on a predestined course, mechanical universe you want to wrench around. I used to believe in all of that nonsense. I've seen things that prove to me that the only thing that governs this universe is chaos."__

"…"

"Yes, there are things that can be predetermined; yes, Dornkirk's theories are sound and almost immaculate. Almost. The flaws are inherent. Don't tell me that you haven't seen them. They are small, but they glare."

"I have."

"And within those glaring flaws lie the answers to everything you ponder."

"If you are so sure of this, why don't you tell me yourself?"

"Because it is something that cannot be explained as well as the intuition itself tells."

Folken stared at Garufo a moment longer and returned to his food. The inner fears and awareness of the unknown, the variables that made the 'mechanical universe' model inept resurfaced and pricked at his mind with refreshed intensity. They were always there, though sometimes more active than not. 

Folken swallowed and set down his fork. He smirked mirthlessly at the table, not seeing the objects in front of him so much as his small corner of the universe.

"I truly am a control freak."

"Yes, you are, son."

"Before you begin, I have been well aware of this for years on end. I cannot stand the idea of chaotic variables in an equation that can wreck such havoc on lives. My aim, with all of these inherent flaws in Dornkirk's theory centered in mind, is to control these chaotic variables as well as I will control those which follow the mechanical model."

Folken's voice was rising passionately with proportionate upward tilting of his face until he was leaning over the table in a position that was almost aggressive. Garufo watched with unreadable impassiveness.

"I will take those unexplainable phenomena—emotions, love, consciousness, sadness, happiness, magic—I will prove their properties, build the bridge between the mind and matter, and manipulate it so as to bring changes to both sides of things. I will fulfill that which is part of the abstract, one of those glaring 'errors'—wish. Hope."

The older sorcerer pulled his cigarette tin out once again and lit a roll.

"…it can't be done, son."

"Yes, it can."

Garufo shook his head as he flicked his lighter off and took a puff of the cigarette, looking down at the table in thought, trying to formulate words to match his mental response. He blew a thin stream of smoke into the table.

"It's been tried before; it's impossible. And even if it was, that is one thing even I wouldn't be fool enough to touch. Can you not see the consequences? How blind can you be, lad?"

Folken relaxed into his seat and cleared his face of the emotion that had flushed the cadaverous mask. "Maybe I am a fool."

"Yes, you're the biggest fool I've ever seen in my life. That's what scares me, Folken. Fools do the impossible because they don't listen to common sense and see the limits. If you achieve your goal, there will be nothing but chaos and sorrow."

"I will make it work."

Garufo laughed mirthlessly and sat back in his chair. He dragged on the cigarette thoughtfully. "You know what? Do you want to do some really impossible alchemy? Figure out women for me. No intellectual analysis or laws of science can explain them."

"I think to 'figure out' conscious beings in general is impossible alchemy."

"True to that, but you might as well start out with what perplexes me the most and go from there."

Folken smirked. "And since I am a fool, this should be possible?"

"Theoretically, yes, but as well you know theory often changes when exposed to practical application." Garufo thought for a moment. "This is what I mean by those glaring errors. There are things that exist that we can't explain. Real idiots, not fools, discount it as 'magic' or a trick of illusion if they can't explain it. They turn blind eyes to it and denounce its existence so as to confirm their theories. Theories should be twisted to suit facts, not facts to suit theories."

Folken watched Garufo for a moment. The older sorcerer was leaning sidesaddle in his chair against the wall, one ankle on the other knee, staring along a linear path as if cultivating knowledge bred from years of seeing passionate foolishness run afoul in the very same patterns.

This was jadedness.

"I have a question for you."

"Yes?"

"If you take such a practical view of things, why did you become a Sorcerer?"

Garufo laughed and shook his head, pressing his cigarette into the basin of the ashtray until it bent and the fire extinguished. To the casual observer, he would appear almost mirthful.

"I ask myself the same question every damn day, son. Every damn day. I would just as well have gone on and stared a bait shop along the coast, reading my life away on the beach while catering to tourists with their families. Life just kicks you in the teeth like that, doesn't it?"

"You kicked yourself in the teeth."

"Yes, yes. Damn, you're right." Garufo sat up straight and finished his food, the rest of the meal passing in relative silence broken only by intermittent self-reflexive chuckles from Garufo and the fluctuating boisterousness of the surrounding tables. The two sorcerers stood and, after giving Annie her good-byes and with Folken making a point not to look her in the eyes, Folken slipped an additional tip alongside Garufo's already generous amount left under his plate.

"Go create something beautiful."


	7. Halo 07: The System

**Halo 07: The System**

"You're fucking insane."

"No, I'm not. I'm just brilliant."

"Brilliant, hardly. Lucky as hell, maybe. You're still fucking insane for taking this junk."

"I am not one to pass up a good opportunity. A safe life is a sterile life. Any life worth living contains some risk."

"Like bringing a potential bomb into the dorm room?"

"Mig, it's not going to explode. It would have done that the first time I dropped it. Hey, can you read those instructions to me?"

Migel sighed and unfolded the laminated, multicolor page that had been found inserted into a slitlike orifice in the largest box of Dalet's newfound mechanism and squinted at the English typed in rows next to colored pictures of contraption parts and wires fitting together with the aid of large arrows. The common language was a blessing, dead and archaic in Gaea but required in the Zaibach education system, and surprisingly used as instructions for seemingly modern-day contraptions from what Dalet claimed to be another planet.

_Whatever. At least I can read this shit. Oh man…_

"Uh…" Migel recalled what little English he had used in his classes extending beyond references to arcane ideas. Half of the words he had never encountered. "Insert the chords for the speakers in their corresponding slots in the back of the subwoofer."

"The who in the what?"

"Does it look like I have a fucking clue?"

"You're supposed to be the smart one."

"Well, I'm not."

Migel sighed and handed the spread to Dalet, the latter of whom began to decipher pictures and hook wires in what he believed were the right spots, feeling mostly by corresponding plug sizes and colors. 

_At least this system is well-organized. So many wires, though. What the fuck IS this thing?_

Migel had silently followed Dilandau to the hangar to monitor his treatment of Dalet, had silently watched Dilandau torture Dalet—clenching his fists until the metal gauntlets cut through the leather seams of his gloves and drew blood—knowing from experience that his interference would only make any punishment worse on his lover, and then had run down to Dalet's aid as soon as their master was out of earshot. Dalet's usual recovery from trauma was quick enough to allow time for cleaning of his guymelef and then to convince Migel to help carry all the parts of this contraption back to their dorm before the end of dinner. They had mercifully avoided any interrogation or detection. Somewhere along the way Dalet had rambled about extraterrestrial beings in pink spaceships and a tin robot, nonsense that usually preceded the revelation of the far more mundane truth. Dalet's world was animated by his mind, and only after his animations could the less important 'real world' take priority.

_And what has all of this nonsense earned me? An empty stomach and a time bomb in my dorm room. It's about time for Dalet to get bored with this alien nonsense and spill the truth._

"You do know that if we get caught with this we're busted."

"Oh, no worries. Nobody ever comes in here."

"Oh, yeah? Our roommate?"

"Nah, Chess'll keep silent. We'll show him and tell him to keep a lid on this if he knows what's good for him. Besides, it's hidden."

Migel looked around skeptically. They were edged against the furthest corner alongside the same wall as the door. A table had been wheeled into the corner to hold the contraption – Migel guessed it was the 'system' to which was referred in the layout, which was a very generic name for something, but the sort of title that came with a capital S to emphasize its status as the grand archetype of something – with a bookshelf pushed against the end opposite the door's wall. The contraption would be shielded from view by the opened door itself.

It would only work if somebody did not visit long enough to close the door.

"You are SO fucking insane."

"You've said that about three times now. Ah." Dalet sat back on his heels. "I think we're done."

Migel looked the System over. There was a monitor, something with which he was at least familiar, a keyboard, and speakers, but the other components remained unfamiliar—odd antennae and boxes, a small domelike contraption with a flat bottom that seemed shaped to fill one's palm. They were definitely machinery, but with unknown purpose.

The black monitor stared back at him.

"…now what?"

"Well… I assume we turn it on or something."

Dalet looked over the leaflet and pressed the large button on the frontside of the largest box, the one called the 'CPU' and the object to which most of the wires connected.

_That has to be the central operating system for all of this nonsense._

Nothing happened.

Dalet pressed the button several more times. There was no reaction.

Migel stared at the blank screen. "Have you considered adding a power source?"

"I was just about to get to that, yes. Hm." Dalet picked up a black chord with a polygonal end from which three metal prongs protruded in a triangular formation. "I think this is the power source. It must be some sort of plug."

"It won't fit into any of our power sources."

"We'll just have to make an adaptor. You know, shoot some electricity through it. It's metal, isn't it?"

Migel buried his head in his hand. "Dalet…"

"No, come on, it'll be easy. One end's gotta be positive, one negative, like in lab, you know? I don't know which one is which."

"The last time you didn't know which one was which, you caused an explosion. And as far as that is concerned, how do you know this whole thing won't blow up as soon as we run a current through it?"

"We'll stand really far back."

"DALET."

"Lighten up. I'll figure this out. Get some wire or something."

Migel sighed heavily and stood up, wondering why the hell he was going through with this insanity, and rummaged through his desk drawer. He sifted through a mixture of papers, socks, odd pencil shavings collecting at the edges of the box, and tools, until he found a spool of wire and a screwdriver.

_The HELL am I doing? This is—oh, that paper, huh; it's probably worth nothing now—this is lunacy. We're going to die, the place is going to explode, Lord Dilandau is going to kill us, Chesta is going to narc, Dalet's going to kill himself—US—I'm going to start a fire with a wire, where the hell did Dalet get that thing—_

"Dalet?"

"Nn?"

"Where did you really get that thing?"

"I thought I told you this. Did you find that wire?"

Migel held the wire behind his back and stood over Dalet. "I'm serious, Dalet."

"Yeah, and so am I. Come on, give me the wire."

Dalet leaned forward, motioning with a waiting palm.

The door burst open, whacking Dalet square in the forehead. 

Migel's stomach dropped. His eyes momentarily blanked out from the roots, obscuring his vision with white pain borne from panic.

_Ohshitohshitohshitohshitohshit__—_

"OW!"

"Oh, Dalet! I'm sorry—what are you doing back—"

Chesta stopped and looked around to where Dalet was sitting amid a run of wires, holding his forehead.  Migel pushed the door closed and waved his hands for silence. The chatter and sound of walking outside muffled. It seemed excruciatingly loud and close.

Chesta blinked at the mess before him while automatically helping Dalet to his feet, looking over his shoulder at Migel in confusion and then looking back at the System. He opened his mouth.

"—new System." Chesta closed his mouth. Dalet patted his shoulder thankfully. "Just don't say a word about this to anybody, no matter what. Keep it on the down-low. I'll explain everything in a moment. Eh—well, thanks for helping me up, but I'm going to sit back down."

Dalet crossed his legs under him and sat once again amid the wires, stared at the plug, and remembered his current task.

"Mig? Where's that wire?"

"Are you all right, Dalet?" asked Chesta weakly.

"Fine, fine. Wire?"

"Hell no."

Dalet turned around and crossed his arms angrily. "What the fuck is your problem?"

"My problem is that we're all going to DIE, Dalet."

"For goodness' sake, it's not going to explode!—"

"I don't care about that! I mean—look, you want to run a live current through naked wires; that's just stupid! You'll short out the breakers. You'll cause a fire. You WILL make something explode."

"Um, guys…" began Chesta.

"No, I won't! I'll be careful! Come on!"

"Not until I find an insulator. I'm going to the storeroom. The wire is going with me."

Dalet gaped at Migel and shook his head. "You are so not—"

"You're damn lucky I am going through with this at all!"

Dalet tried to think of a response and fumbled through half-though protests. Migel walked out of the dorm room and slammed the door.

_WHY is he so fucking spastic? ARGH—_

The hallway crowd had thinned. Migel half-expected the few slayers remaining in the hallway to round on him, sense his apprehension and guilt, and tear the wire from his hands, immediately deducing that he had an alien System in his room and that his insane boyfriend was going to use it as a bomb.

_Of course, that's ridiculous. They'll assume you're fixing a—I don't know—a lamp or something. Calm down. Dalet's just blowing off steam. He'll come around when I get back._

_This is so insanely stupid._

---------------------

"What is that thing?"

Dalet continued to turn the odd plug over and over in his hands and shrugged, humming in thought. Chesta sighed and shrugged off his heavy overcoat, relieved that the weight of the metal and leather was finally alleviated until tomorrow morning. Dalet was already stripped to his violet undershirt and black pants.

_He must have been in here a while. He wasn't at dinner after all…_

"Hey. Dalet."

"Yeah?"

"Did Lord Dilandau give you a lot of hell for this afternoon?"

"What? Nah." Dalet flicked one of the more flattened prongs on the plug. "He just made me lick my Alseides and my insides ended up all over the paint job he loves so much, but nothing else."

"Ew."

_Well, at least I have some idea of why he skipped dinner. At least it's not because he's too mutilated to move. Hell, he looks horrible. Jaw's turning purple and black. But at least he's cruising along. Dalet, the invincible hyperactive slayer, good as always._

_If he was in the hospital he wouldn't be doing crazy shit like this, at least…_

"What is this thing?"

"I already told you. The System."

"Um… I can sort of see that. System of what?" Chesta leaned down to examine Dalet's work. "It looks like some of the technology in the command rooms."

"Or in the capital, yeah. Heavy shit. Isn't it great?"

"Great? Well, yeah, but where the hell did you get this?"

Dalet threw the plug into the corner and leaned back on his arms, looking up through a sparse curtain of wires at the steep faces of the boxes on the table. 

"Aliens, extraterrestrial beings from another world. In exchange for my silence."

"Right. I assume they were pink."

"No, one green, one made of tin—something bionic. The little green one stood to my knee."

"Oh, and I'm sure he was here to conquer us all and give us anal probes."

"No, though he did make some ungentlemanly comments about my balls."

"…excuse me?"

"You heard me. And the green one was Lord Zim of the Irken Empire. When he returns to this planet to conquer, in exchange for my silence, he will reward me."

"…" Chesta nodded. "I see."

"You don't believe me, do you?"

"Of course not. That's a load of shit."

"You have such a very limited imagination."

"I'm just not insane, Dalet." Chesta straddled the back of a chair and rested his chin on folded arms atop the headrest. "Seriously, where did you get this? Did you steal it?"

"I'm not insane enough to do that, fucknook. That's high treason. I'm in the army. I'd be court marshaled if Lord Dilandau didn't flay me alive first. Besides, all of the stuff on this rock is locked up. Lord Folken is the only one with any access."

"I don't know. Maybe you're sleeping with him for this stuff."

"Hah."  Dalet started laughing and waved his hand. "I wouldn't mind if he didn't scare the living fuck out of me. He's hot. Wouldn't happen, though. Fucking him is probably like fucking a robot. Besides, Migel would go on a bloody rampage of revenge and kill us both. It would be like a bad B-flick or something."

"Not just a B-flick, a bad B-flick."

"Yeah, hyperactive pretty boy thaws the frozen heart of a beautiful man, then the boy's former lover kills them both in a bloody rampage that ends in the ship crashing and a bad cover title song playing over the end credits about everlasting love. Something like that."

Chesta started laughing. Dalet's laugh dissolved into the giggles and he leaned back further, looking up at his forest of machinery. All his. All his.

"It could be cooling the heart of Lord Dilandau," said Chesta.

"That I would not mind in the least bit."

"Yes, I know. Trust me, I know. God, he's perfect." _Perfect in every way. Gorgeous. Beautiful._

"But seriously, this came from outer space," said Dalet.

"But seriously, you're whacked, Mr. Hyperactive Pretty Boy."

"I think I need to be whacked. Right across the ass."

"Yeah, do it to yourself."

"You're cruel, Mr. Ralven."

"I know." There was a pause. "Dalet…"

"Hn?"

"Seriously, this could get us into a lot of trouble. Somebody could mistake this for stolen technology. Lord Dilandau doesn't like to ask questions. The Sorcerers are on the ship right now, they might… you know… think it's theirs. Even if it's not, who says they won't say it is to get it themselves?"

"Now you're just being paranoid."

"I'm being practical. And I know how Lord Dilandau works."

"He won't touch us without reason. We're his elite."

"He didn't need much of a reason to beat you today."

"I was late."

"You're late all the time, Dalet. And that was, you know, a minor offence. This is near conspiracy."

"Why? We're not hurting anybody." Dalet sat up. "When are you going to stop being Lord Dilandau's absolute bitch?"

Chesta was offended. 

"Because—" Chesta gripped the back of the chair. "—because he's our lord. He gave us our guymelefs, he makes us who we are, he's part of us. He's _Dilandau_." _Lord Dilandau. Isn't that enough, Dalet?_

Dalet's eyes clouded over. He was staring at the ceiling, mouth pulled into a firm line, serious with rare occasion. When the need arose, he could hide his thoughts with ease beneath a mask of faux anger.

_Maybe even that mask of a smile. I don't know. Dalet isn't the depressive type. You never know these days. Damn it, doesn't he realize his place? _

"I think you've been forgetting your place little by little, Dalet."

"What does that mean?"

"I mean…" Chesta stammered. _Entering dangerous waters, part one._ "Ever since you and Mig hooked up, you two have been getting a little… I don't know… independent. No, bad word choice." (Dalet's mouth thinned.) "A little… rebellious. I mean, yeah, you guys still obey, but your attitude…eh…"

"Sorry that I don't see myself as somebody's absolute and total bitch anymore."

"Dalet!"

Dalet glared at Chesta. "Migel and I are still loyal to Lord Dilandau to the very end."

"I—I never said that you weren't! Dalet—"

"Just because we don't worship the very ground he walks on, just because we see that other people can be as grand, just because we see that you don't have to be a goddamned god to demand any respect or love from anybody—we disagree with his methods. Hell, I fucking hate his methods, treating us like shit, and I'm still fucking loyal to him, Chesta. That's getting a fuck of a lot out of me, all right?"

"I…" Chesta swallowed. _That went terribly. Oh shit, he's mad at me now. My roommate is pissed. Shit. Shit. Nice job, Chesta. You _really_ fucked that over._

"Dalet, I'm sorry. I just—…" Chesta was hoping that Dalet would cut in before he had to say what he 'just', but Dalet was staring at him. Chesta swallowed. "I just… eh…"

"No, I understand, Chesta. Chesta Ralven, Dilandau's perfect little pet. Dilandau's favorite. Dilandau's little bitch."

"I am not!"

"I bet you're fucking with him, aren't you? Letting him abuse your body for whatever the hell he wants? He owns you that much?"

"I—" Chesta went red. "I most certainly am not! I have more self-respect than that!" _And I'm not worthy. God, I'm not worthy for that._

"Do you? Do you really? Think for a moment, Chess. If Dilandau asked you to impale yourself with a burning stake and jump off the bridge over the Mystic Valley, you'd do it."

"Well… no, but wouldn't you for a good reason?"

Dalet gaped. "…you're fucking unbelievable."

"I'm not saying that I would, I'm just saying… well, in theory… if, say, it had to be done for some crazy reason for some mission or something—DALET!"

Dalet stood up and strode out of the room, slamming the door. The reverberations along the wood-over-stone walls numbed after time, spreading along the length and breadth of the room in a smooth wave. The System remained stable.

Chesta sighed heavily and rested his forehead on his folded arms. _Oh Gods, now you've done it. Fucknook, indeed. He'll be back. Sooner or later, he has to be back. He always cools down. Fights like that don't resolve easily. At least he's quick to cool down._

Chesta was loathe to admit that his feelings had been sorely hurt, partially because he was aware of how close to the truth Dalet had ventured in assessing Chesta's self worth. It was near nil when association with Lord Dilandau was not factored into the equation, though Chesta was well aware of his deficit in self-confidence and spent considerable time trying to psyche himself into accumulating a greater degree. Dalet just had the courtesy to touch some very sore nerves.

_It's all true, though. You know damn well it's true. You'd ford the ocean for him. You'd move mountains. You'd gladly surrender your body—stop that nonsense. This isn't the time for it. Calm down, man. Oh, but I'd love it. I'd love it so very much. It'll never happen, so you might as well jack off about it, you sick little freak._

The door opened.

Chesta looked up as the door closed, half-terrified that the newcomer could immediately see his thoughts written all over his face, etched into his burning cheeks. Guilt—arousal—shame—small degrees of self-disgust—

"Chesta? Where's Dalet?" asked Migel.

"Ah…" Chesta sat up and took a deep breath. _Time to present yourself, soldier._ "He—we had a spat, so he walked out in a huff. He should be back soon."

"Oh." Migel sighed and shook his head. "What about?"

"Typical stuff. I think he's a bloody crazy liar, things like that." _And you're a bloody liar. Liar. Liar. Stop that. This is none of Migel's business, even though you indirectly talked about him. Liar._

"Wow, what a coincidence. I think he is too." Migel set the spool of wire and insulating tubing on the desk next to the System. "And I also think it's rather unlike him to get offended because we think one of his little fantasies is a bold-faced lie."

"Urm…"

Migel was staring straight at Chesta, trying to pry a confession of the true passing of events. Chesta swallowed and averted his eyes.

"I'll tell you later." _Coward._


	8. Halo 08: The Sound of Silence

**Halo 08: The Sound of Silence**

_"Fools" said I, "You do not know   
Silence like a cancer grows.   
Hear my words that I might teach you,   
Take my arms that I might reach you."   
But my words like silent raindrops fell,   
And echoed   
In the wells of silence _

_And the people bowed and prayed   
To the neon god they made.   
And the sign flashed out its warning,   
In the words that it was forming.   
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets   
are written on the subway walls   
And tenement halls."   
And whisper'd in the sounds of silence. _

                        --Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"

Garufo activated the keypad next to the door leading to Folken's small lab sector of the _Vione_ and slipped through the hermetically-sealed barrier as soon as it slid open with a soft hiss. He was once again in his cloak, though beneath he wore his civilian tunic and pants. There was no point in changing back to his robes. Nobody could see beneath his cloak, and he was not planning upon working in the lab where the protective vinyl would be necessary.

The initial chamber was a small locker room with an adjoining lavatory and shower. The room was bathed in deep blue light, casting the characteristic cadaverous pallor so associated with sorcerers across Garufo's face to contrast with his cloak. 

_This poor light nonsense again. Seeing well should be more important than image—_

As Garufo took a step into the room, fluorescent lights flickered to life. Garufo closed his eyes in pain and allowed his pupils to halfway contract in reaction the light filtered through his lids. He nodded approvingly. Good lighting, safe. The kid wasn't so far gone as to think himself allergic to good lighting.

Betraying Folken was not Garufo's choice action after having shared dinner with him and dispensing heartfelt paternal advice, though there was no choice. Folken did not have jurisdiction over this new subject, nor did he have proper containment equipment. He had quit the organization. Science belonged in the capital, not on the floating rock.

_If he wants to study this so badly, he can come to the capital just as he always does to do his Fate Alteration Project. _The guilt did not alleviate with this deduction. Garufo sighed._ And just where is that young boy being kept, anyway? Surely not in the lab. There are many potential weapons for him to attain—ah, so simple._

The lavatory. Of course. It was the most sensible place to leave somebody for several hours. Running water and facilities. Garufo had always been opposed to the medieval practice of leaving prisoners in confined cells with neither available; it was demeaning and disgustingly unhygienic. Idiots who ran dungeons in the more backwater countries either didn't care or didn't have the simple foresight to see these problems. _You would think that they would learn after a few centuries. It is a good way to harbor a breakout of plague._

Sure enough, the door had been securely dead-bolted and padlocked from the outside. The fixtures were crudely placed within a matter of what Garufo estimated was minutes. The shavings from the drill were still on the otherwise swept floor. With the aid of a pair of priers Garufo had in his coat the locks were broken in a matter of minutes. He knocked on the door.

"Excuse me? May I come in?"

There was a scrabbling, then silence. A voice answered: "Ah, welcome, welcome. Come in."

_English. Good, good._

Garufo set the priers on the table behind him and opened the door, noticing immediately that the walls had been slashed with black out of the corners of his eyes. He detoured his focus on the young man curled up in the corner to the wounded tile. He choked in surprise. The bathroom had become a makeshift shrine to insanity. Every expanse of free space had been scrawled up with haggard, angular print that must have been written with bold, angry slashes. Some statements were written in huge print, other smaller passages scribbled underneath in paragraphs. 

_This must have taken a month! What in the hell?—He's crazy. He's utterly barking mad. Where the hell did he get a pen? This is utter lunacy. Folken, what have you brought to us? _

The words towered above him, on the ceiling, reaching up, doming the room. The rail-thin young man in the corner was looking up with him, following his progress with a detachment that seemed to originate in the roots of his eyes. He was thinking himself a prophet.

"Amazing, isn't it?" asked the young man.

Garufo continued to read. It wasn't as amazing as it was haunting. _This sort of insanity—this detachment from reality, this delusion, the last boy that you saw like this is now commanding an entire troop of our army. Our elite. But never like this. He never took it out like this. This is almost artistic. This is…pathetic. But I can't help but feel sorry for this boy._

MY MIND, MY BODY, MY SOUL, OFFER IT TO HEAVEN AND SPIT IT BACK OUT.

HATE ALL, LOVE ALL, NO MEDIUM, THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. HUMANS ARE PIGS.

HATE YOU. HATE ME. I AM A GOD. I AM THE WASTE LOCK.

AND THE SOUND OF THEIR TORMENT SHALL BE AN ANGEL'S CHOIR TO A DEMONIC SOUL. I AM SO DARK. I HATE GOTHS.

NAILBUNNY, COME BACK TO ME. I HAVE TACOS.

BAND STICKER.

AND ONLY THAT I COULD BE A CREATURE THAT DOES NOT FEEL. EFFICIENT. DEADLY. I WANT TO BE THE SAMSA. SAMSA IS DEAD. I WILL BECOME A MACHINE. NO GHOST IN THIS HAUNTED SHELL.

KILL ME.

WATCH ME NOW, FOLLOW MY MOVEMENTS, CALL ME GOD AND THEN WHAT HAVE YOU? NOTHING. I AM NOTHING TO YOU, I NEVER WAS AND NEVER WILL BE. STOP TRYING TO BE LIKE ME. I HATE MYSELF. I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE. IF POSSIBLE, I HATE YOU EVEN MORE. HUMANS ARE HELL. HUMANS CREATED HELL ON EARTH. EARTH IS HELL AS LONG AS HUMANS ARE HERE. KILL THE HUMANS AND END THE TORMENT. ROBOTS. I WANT TO LIVE AS AN INSECT, FEELING NOTHING. I WANT TO CUT OUT MY HEART. HEH. IT ONLY PUMPS BLOOD. BUT THAT IT WAS TRULY THE SOURCE OF EMOTION, THAT I COULD CUT IT OUT AND BECOME A MACHINE, NO FEELING NO~~~~

HELP. PLEASE. HELP. HELP. HELP. HELP.

NAILBUNNY I WANT YOU BACK.

AND THERE WAS A RAVEN, KNOCKING KNOCKING KNOCKING—

_Whacked. He's completely whacked. Raving, barking mad. But this is still somehow haunting, not scary, just haunting. Just sad. Just pathetically sad that anybody could be in this state. Definitely adolescent, probably schizophrenic, possibly a sociopath. I am sure he thinks himself a genius of some sort. Some sort of lost prophet, anyway. He really is no different. He's not that brilliant._

_Telling him that is the first way to piss him off, I am sure. What is a nailbunny?_

CAN'T GO BACK, NO PLACE TO GO BACK TO LIFE IS LOST, FLOWERS FALL IF THIS IS A DREAM, COME WAKE ME UP IF IT'S ALL REAL, JUST KILL ME.

"Enjoying the show, old man?"

Garufo furrowed his eyebrows and looked back down at the young man, the latter of whom was still gazing at the walls as if he had no intention of making eye contact. The gesture was a familiar mechanism of defense or a scattered mind, whichever would apply in this case. _Probably the latter. Perhaps the former. This young man has social problems, in any case._

"An interesting job you've done on this room." 

"It's the least I could do for my captor, wherever the hell he is right now. It is also quite therapeutic. You see, I could have flooded the room by breaking the pipes as an alternative and then drowned in the process, but that would put a rather untimely stop to my search for meaning in this life."

"So you are not suicidal?" _At least that's something. I won't have to have him under constant guard._

"Oh, very, but it never works. I can't die."

"You're an immortal."

"No, nothing like that. I just can't die. You see, one time I stuck my head down the garbage disposal, and I still didn't die. I tried to electrocute myself, and I didn't die. Granted, the probes were uncharged at the time, but some cosmic force made me forget to charge them. Something in the universe wants me to remain alive to collect all of the pain and the shit in the world. I'm a fucking martyr. An effigy that isn't allowed to die. Isn't life a bitch?"

"You don't say." Garufo looked around. "Do you mind if I have a seat?"

"No, not at all." The young man looked up and, with a sudden change in disposition that caught Garufo off guard, grinned and offered a spidery, gloved hand. "I am Johnny C., though since you are one of the few people I can stand at the moment, you may call me 'Nny'."

"Hain Garufo." Garufo took the offered hand and shook it firmly, taking a seat on the closed toilet. Despite appearances, Johnny's bones seemed very stable. His grip was firm. "I go by my surname."

"Garufo, then. Pleased to meet you. Charmed, _encantado_." Johnny slipped away from the handshake and sat back against the wall. He was still smiling, however thinly. "So, where is Mr. Scissorhands?"

"I know nobody by that name. Do you mean a tall young man dressed as I am with a bionic hand?"

"Um, sure, yeah. Mr. Scissorhands. Or Clawhands."

"It would be Claw_hand_, and that particular young man is named Folken. I assure you that despite outward appearances, he's completely harmless."

"Folken what? That his surname?"

"It's his given name. He prefers not to use his surname for personal reasons."

"What, like, he thinks he's too cool for a last name? Thinks he's a god? Like Napoleon? Madonna?"

"Neither of those names are familiar to me. Wait…" Garufo tried to recall his sparse lessons of Atlantean mythology. The class had never been a great interest to him, being more a time to sleep and complete other homework than anything. _Years ago. Damn, I'm an old man._ "Madonna, a goddess of some sort?"

"Um, well, I guess if you're really into eighties pop, sure. Thought he was wearing makeup. Didn't get a clear look at all. Sort of grunge thing going on or he thinks he's _really_ hardcore. Sounds like an ego trip prick to me. I already dislike him."

"Well, I don't know what you mean by 'grunge' or 'hardcore', but as far as titles are concerned, I can assure you that his case is nothing of the sort. It is not the sort of thing he likes to discuss. I believe that you two would actually get along quite well." _Sadly. So very sadly._ "Despite appearances… well, I don't know; he is much younger than everybody thinks he is. I believe you two are about the same age."

"Well, good for him, yes. Maybe he won't be a closed-minded old prick. Or a barely post-twenties washed-up junkie who still thinks himself rebellious because he wears black. Ph3r3 the goths."

"He's… twenty-five." _I could swear I heard a 'ph' sound in 'fear'._

"Yes, very interesting." Johnny's attention already seemed to be wandering out the corners of his eyes. "Yes, extremely. Fascinating. Twenty-five cents will no longer buy a soda. Sad, these days."

"You don't say. Tell me, is your surname just 'C' as in a letter or 'See'?"

"Just 'C'. I forgot the rest at some point. Never really needed it. My business transactions aren't that legal. I never seem to need anything like that. Like I'm born above the system, or at least outside of it somehow."

"I see."

"But isn't it closed-minded to think that just because people would be old they would be washed-up? Yes, most little teenagers are annoying-as-hell little yaps that think themselves so _cool _and _different_, so lost in their delusions of pseudo-detachment and social rebellion while immersing themselves in the social circle of their own making that while condemning society for laughing at their fishnets, laughs at a guy because he doesn't listen to their bands and drink five dollar coffee while laughing at other people who aren't just like them. Isn't that bloody ironic?"

"I know what you're talking about, at any rate." Garufo had seen the sort of thing around the university. A nation of youth gone to waste, depressed and hopeless, rebelling against the technological society and instead finding their answers to life in visions spurred by hallucinogenic mushrooms, not in particles racing around an accelerator, as had his generation. _Either philosophy seems equally pointless anymore._

"Guy wears a lot of makeup? Thinks he's really hardcore?"

"Um… well, he does wear makeup." _And it makes him look like a damn fool, as I keep telling him, but kids like to keep their quirks. What is it with you and makeup and 'hardcore', anyway?_

"Yeah, bet he has tattoos as well. Pierced up. I really have nothing against that stuff. Beautiful, but you see, I am so delusional that I cannot separate the genuine articles—the ones with any true intelligence, the ones who are depressed because they really see what a shithole the world is—and the ones who are just so pathetic and insecure that they join a herd of 'spooky' black sheep. So I just kill them all. I haven't met one I like yet."

"You've committed murder."

"Oh, in horrible ways. It's quite therapeutic. Think of it as a public service."

"I see." _Lunatic, homicidal, dangerous. Definitely. To establish some things… think clearly and STOP shaking, Hain. What the hell is wrong with you? The kid is fine. Worse is probably running free with a sword around the Vione right now. Yes, the kid is harmless at the moment. You have a dagger under your cloak; he is probably unarmed. Folken would not leave him with weapons._

_But I do believe that he would commit murder. So what? – calm down. He's just an angsty kid._

"So…" Garufo steepled his hands in front of his mouth and watched Johnny carefully. "Nny? Do you think that you are insane?"

"What? Oh, yes. I'm horribly insane. Utterly whacked. I know that I belong in a padded cell on the corner of a hill. But I do believe that sometimes I am more sane than the rest of the world. And in some ways, not. At least the rest of the world doesn't see floating decapitated bunny heads. Or something."

"So, you are aware of the fact that you hallucinate." _Floating decapitated bunny heads? The hell? Morbid._

"Painfully. But how can I tell that I'm not right now. How can you tell that you're not? How do you know that your entire world is not just a hallucination, that you are not just a dismembered conscious spirit in a world of your own creation? That you are not truly living? That your entire life is not just a fabrication?" Johnny brought his forefinger and thumb together as if trying to draw his argument into a fine point, pushing back so hard on the joints that it appeared that his finger would snap. "IS THERE REALLY A SPOON?"

_Spoon? What in the hell?_

"I do not see a spoon anywhere, Mr. Nny."

"Yes, you wouldn't, would you, you closed-minded old man? But that is not my point. You have not seen _The Matrix_. Yes, not in this world." Johnny watched Garufo out of the corners of his eyes, still hugging his knees. "I am not from your world."

"Yes, I know. And this is precisely why I wanted to talk to you this evening."

"Oh." Johnny sank down below his folded arms. "Only because of that."

"No." _Actually, yes._ "I also wanted to get to know you."

"Oh, that's very good. You see, I've always wanted a friend. I need a friend to talk to. It gets rather lonely, no matter how much I try to detach myself from humans in general. That is part of my 'succumbing to my urges' complex I so hate. It's like trying to quit smoking. I can't go cold turkey on human contact, but I'm working on it."

"That is rather depressing, young man."

"Life is, isn't it?"

"If I may detour from talking about your home planet for a moment…"

"Of course."

"I think that you're one of the people you hate. One of those closed-minded people. But I see a lot of potential for so much more. Why do you tend to think that depression is the only way to be enlightened? That if you're happy, you're ignorant? That the only way to be 'deep' is to be insanely depressed? Isn't that amazingly closed-minded?"

Johnny stared at the black-slashed canvas of wall, not seeming to listen for a moment. Then he turned his stare to Garufo. Garufo stared back, inwardly preparing himself for some sort of assault. _Curses, you fool! Why did you have to piss him off—just see how far he goes. See how much he understands. Try to reason. You might win his respect this way. Give it a chance. Get your hand off that dagger handle._

"Oh, you're right." The ghost of a smile hovered around Johnny's lips. "Oh, you are so very right, old man! Yes, you're scraping the surface; very good! I utterly loathe myself! I'm aware of all of this! But you, you had the balls to come out and say it. Or ovaries. Most people just nod and smile and agree while sweating their brains—or their balls, hah, you see—off and not listen to a word I say. The just want to appease me. But you challenge me. You're thinking about what I say. I appreciate that; I really do. It makes me happy. We could be great friends."

"I am glad to hear that." _Thank god. Thank god._ "And just scraping the surface is no fun. Our entire conversation so far—very hackneyed, very trite? Hardly, I would say, but you seem bored with it."

"Because we don't just dive past the surface. Yes, let's dive!" Johnny jumped up and raised clawed hands toward heaven as if trying to draw down divine intervention from some deity, trying to center himself in a microcosm of grandeur. The black insanity-slashed room domed above him. "Let's swim together! Let's frolic like dolphins! Let's psychoanalyze! Let's think of something I haven't heard before! It would be lovely." Johnny lowered his hands. "Yes, it would be lovely. Shame, shame really."

Johnny was now twisting his toe on the ground in a coy manner. Garufo blinked. _What now?_

"Is something wrong? I believe you had a lovely idea."

"Oh, I want to do this. I really, really do. No, wait." Johnny looked up and braced his chin at the juncture of his thumb and index finger, thinking. "…that uniform, what does it signify?"

Garufo looked down at his cloak, ridiculously high-collared and cumbersome in his opinion. _And annoying. Stupid ornaments on the collar._ "This? This cloak is part of the uniform of the Sorcerer organization."

"Sorcerers? What, is that a band or something? Sounds like a backlash of industrial gothic operatic rock."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Band. Rock band. You know, band stickers, shirts that claim how un-corporate you are, lead singer always kills himself."

"A musical band? No, no." Garufo started laughing in spite of himself. He was having vivid mental images of Foruma playing the sitar and Paruchi on bongos. _And I sing lead, I suppose._ "God, no. Nothing as exciting. We are just an elite group of intellectuals. Experimenters. Scientists."

"Scientists, eh? I like science. I want to learn more about the world. But can science explain the fragile web of fucked-up human relations?"

"No. Some people think that it might, but it never will. Science is cumbersome and earthbound."

"I'm glad that we see eye-to-eye." Johnny nodded approvingly, still holding his chin in thought and sizing Garufo up. His eyes were roving up and down the man carefully. In spite of himself, Garufo's hand strayed toward the dagger handle once again.

"Yes," Johnny said, "so glad. So very glad. It's too bad. We could have been very good friends."

Garufo's stomach gave a jolt. _He's going to try something. He's going to try something bloody stupid. Damn it, I don't want to hurt this kid. He's valuable, yes, but I feel damned sorry for him now. We need him alive. Damn it…_

"What is too bad, might I ask?"

"It is too bad that I have to kill you. So sad."

Garufo grasped the dagger at his waist, maneuvering his shoulder so that the movements were shrouded in a loose curtain of his cape. _Damn it. Don't do it, kid. I don't want to hurt you. You're unarmed. I'm older, but I'm bigger. You look like you'd snap. Come on._

"Strange. We were getting along so nicely. Why must I die?"  
Garufo was staring Johnny down, using the sort of stance that he would use to calm a wary tiger. Showing dominance, but hiding needless aggression. Firm, disciplinary. _Don't do it, kid. Don't do it. But do what? What the hell can you do?_

An odd thought occurred to Garufo at that moment_: I know this is reality because there were some things in my life that I felt, beyond a doubt, were true. Kid, have you felt those things? Have you fallen in love yet? Science can't explain that, kid. Damn—concentrate, man. Watch his movements. What's he going to do? Follow his eyes._

"Because I need your blood."

Garufo blinked. This was not the answer he had been expecting.

"My blood?"

"The corporeal manifestations of my inner demons tend to follow me, you see." Johnny patted one of the graffitied walls. "You see, I can hear him pushing through the wall. Blood on the wall tends to keep him at bay. So you must die."

Garufo compared the wall Johnny had indicated to their relative location on the ship. It was the wall closest to the laboratory.

"That wall is directly adjacent to a laboratory. Maybe you are hearing machinery."

"Oh, no, no. I know the sounds my demons make."

_Mental. Bats. Come on, Hain, nerves up. You still have those reflexes you had when you were younger. Watch him._

"But there is also," Johnny continued, now beginning to stalk forward—Garufo held his ground and slipped the dagger out of its sheath millimeters--"the fact that you have come too close to the truth, the fact that I am only an experiment to you, and the fact that you think you know me well enough to analyze me. That really pisses me off. You have no way of understanding!"

_No, kid. _You_ have no idea of understanding._

"Are you that insecure? To harm me because I come close to the truth?"

"AND BECAUSE YOU MUTILATE IT."

And a few seconds after Johnny had yelled that, Garufo knew that it would be one of the last things he would ever hear.

Johnny did not move exceptionally quickly, nor did he exhibit exceptional skill in combat. Garufo should have been able to immobilize him easily. But he could not. The dagger would not hit Johnny. The blade refused to hit the young man.

Something was throwing it off course.

Garufo drew the dagger and held it at ready—Johnny yanked on a shower curtain; the rod crashed down, ripping its supports with it—Garufo shook his head and yelled one last chance for Johnny to settle down, this isn't worth it, just calm down and we'll talk—Johnny had yanked the rubber nub off of the end of the curtain rod; it was a sharp, circular edge; he held it like a battering ram—Garufo readied himself to dodge—running—the metal flashed toward him—Garufo slashed at Johnny—miss—miss—duck—Johnny tripped over his back—the boy's back was back exposed—_hit him in the head—the head man, the head—but—_

The dagger hilt would not make contact with the skull. In the way that like charges between magnets repel, so was the pommel stone of Garufo's dagger from Johnny's skull. Garufo lost his grip. A million things coincided at one time. Garufo was immobile. All of his skill and dexterity, such as it was, left him. Muddled, immobilized, he could only watch in horror as Johnny spun around in the enclosed space, the rod scraping against the tiles and the curtain swishing, and readied his weapon, aiming for Garufo's chest.

Garufo closed his eyes, straightened, and dropped his dagger, almost amused, terrified and weak. This was a fortune-enhanced individual, just as Folken had guessed.

And in the last few seconds of Garufo's life, it all made sense.

_Why he was brought here._

Garufo's last, steadying breath was cut off by excruciating pain, mercifully quick in implementation—harsh, horrifying cracking—his sternum cracked—the rod shoved through his organs and punctured his lungs—blunt end, dragging tendons, snapping vessels—out his back, through ribs, missing the spine. Garufo screamed in pain and fell to his back—_no, I cannot even die on my back, not even lying down_—rolled over onto his side, away from the bar, feeling the air slip right through his lungs.

_I'm going to die. This is really it._

Through blurred vision he saw the steel toes of heavy boots walk into his view. Garufo looked up. Johnny was standing above him with a look that almost resembled pity and regret, thinking about something.

He was covered in blood. _My blood—that is my blood, this is my blood spilling out, pooling under me, flooding my mouth. God, let it end. Please. Let this end. Have mercy on somebody who wronged you in so many ways._

The walls spun above him, an almost cathedral-like presence of immaculate white marred with black messages. _The writing on the wall. I'm dying in hell. I'm going to hell, but I'm dying in hell._

It was mercifully beginning to get numb. Garufo closed his eyes, trying to process the last thing he had read. 

CRUCIFY ME, BLEED ME TO DEATH. YOU HAVE ROBBED ME OF LIFE.

_How trite. How very… trite._

Johnny was riffling through his cloak, relieving him of the keys he kept on his belt and his daggers. _Oh no. He's loose, he's going to kill—he's going after everybody. He's going to—Folken, get the hell off the ship now._

"Don't—" Garufo choked on blood. "Don't—"

"You see, there was another reason I had to kill you, but I forgot to mention it. Yes, I am now on a mission of revenge. I'm going to do more public service. Think of it as spring cleaning. Now." Johnny leaned down and whispered in Garufo's ear, moving his lips in such a way that Garufo numbly registered it as a soft kiss. He wanted to recoil—this was not his right to perform, the boy did not have the right to touch him that way, only—

"Where is the albino in red armor?" whispered Johnny.

_Dilandau Albatou?_ Garufo weakly registered the information. _He wants to kill that demon? How ironic. Can't say that it would be a waste… though pity on both of them._

"No answer?" Johnny whispered. "Come on, old friend. A last request."

Garufo did not answer.

"I really am sorry, old man. Mr. Garufo. Hain."

Garufo closed his eyes. _Irony that the last person to use that name is one who took everything from me, now giving me my goodbye kiss. I'm dying in his presence. Marica… Marcia, I'm sorry. That's all I can think of right now. At least you can't see me right now. That it were you right here instead. Even dying by your hand wouldn't be so bad… I wouldn't mind…meet me on the other side…but you're still alive, aren't you, love?_

"Why, since I have your keys I don't have to stay in here! So I don't have to worry about the wall. Isn't that ironic? You didn't have to die after all! Life's a bitch."

_You're a bitch._

"Yes, a slow bleeding death. Oh, I'm sorry; I guess you did have to die for me to escape. But I could have let you die more quickly. I really am sorry. Yes."

Garufo was going blind already, but he had the gut inclination—almost as if he had extrasensory sight heightened in death, a sort of phenomenon that occurred at times during his life—that Johnny was dragging his toe in a coy manner once again.

"No last words? No? It's too bad. You really are my only friend on the whole planet at the moment. Consider this my last and final gift to you. You are at last free."

_Maybe he is right in a way after all._

Johnny ran from the room, the jangling of the keys moving further and further in the distance. Garufo barely heard the hermetically-sealed door open and close. _One way door. God damn it, one way door… one way…_

_One way… out of life… good…_

Seconds after Johnny's escape, Garufo was indeed free. _Approach a prisoner, leave a free man. Good bye, Johnny. And may your karma backlash with all of its power._

---------

Recognize X-Japan lyrics on the walls? "Art of Life"—not mine.


	9. Halo 09: Variation Tragedy

**Halo 09: Variation Tragedy**

It took half an hour for a night guard to discover the bloody bootprints staggering from the lab door trailed by the tip of some implement dragging along the floor and drawing spidery patterns of carmine along the dusty walkway.

There was silence, and then—

-----------

It did not take long for a second guard to come across the body of his comrade, sprawled in the hallway on its side in a filling lake of its own blood. The man stumbled backwards, covering his mouth and desperately trying to hold in whatever was trying to rip from his throat—a scream or a retch, equally probable given the circumstances.

"Hello down there," said a tenor voice from the rafters.

The man screamed as the voice's owner dropped upside-down and hung from the support beams along the hallway arch. The cadaverous creature was grinning. Blood was dripping from the rafters about an inch on either side of his head. The blood fell into the pool congregating around the man's boots.

The man screamed again.

"Oh, I truly am sorry about that. I have my weapon stored up here, and it has gotten rather dirty at both ends. Giving it a bit of a drip-dry. I do so loathe to touch the fluids that are supposed to drive human emotions if I can at all help it."

"GET BACK!"

The man fumbled with his sword and communicator interchangeably with a shaking hand, trying to decide which one to use first, backing away from the grinning boy who was now tilting his head in mild amusement. The communicator clacked loudly against his belt. His hand clenched around it, shaking so badly that the device was loosened from its plastic holster and clattered into the pool of blood.

"I… I am a member of the Zaibach army… and… all things you say will be… used…"

"Hmm, Zaibach, Zaibach, Zaibach." The boy stroked his chin with his thumb, cradling the other side in the crook of his index finger. "That's your organization. I see. Well, Mr. Rent-a-Cop of Zaibach, today is your lucky day. You aren't going to die!"

"Uh… will be…" The man stumbled back over the body and fell against the corner wall. "What the… who the hell… what do you WANT?"

"Oh, I am so sorry. Johnny at your service, but please, call me Nny. Now." Johnny beckoned the man with his forefinger. The glove was stained with blood. "You're a Rent-a-Cop like this lady here? Good. I want you to call your superior and give him a message. Would you be willing to do that for me? Pretty please?"

_General Adelphos? Strategos Folken? Commander Albatou? What the—Gundress Micra? Head of—oh god… Beth… god… god… I'm going to die…_ The man gripped his sword hilt and cleared his vision. It was a tangible hold on reality. _This isn't happening… this isn't happening…_

"Now, come on…" Johnny nodded sympathetically. "It's a horrible shock to have somebody die, isn't it? What's your name?"

"E—Eric B—"

"Come now, Eric; let's be logical. I'm offering you the chance to walk away from here with all of your limbs attached. Do you want me to rebuke my offer? I'll just have to place a little intercom call myself."

"I—" Eric's mouth was already paper-dry. He swallowed and scrabbled back against the stone wall. Much to his dismay, it wasn't absorbing him away from the monster. "—yeah--…wait…I mean…"

-----------

There was silence, and then—

"I can't suffer morons. Do learn to communicate more clearly. Lack of communication results in such painful isolation and misinterpretation. It is better this way for you."

Johnny cleaned his shower curtain rod on the fallen guard's shirt and retrieved the communicator from the bloodwashed ground. The handheld device looked very much like an Earthian shortwave radio—he deduced: hold to talk, turn on to listen. It was surprisingly easy.

Johnny switched the communicator on and held it up to his ear. Static shot through the silent hallway, whining—Johnny winced and tuned the radio—and then an utterly clear frequency.

_Perfect._

Johnny depressed the talk button and cleared his throat—

---------------

_…ow…_

Folken lay face-down on his bed clad only in the black pants he wore under his uniform, hair soaking and hanging in his eyes from yet another shower. The headache had returned in full force. He had taken several painkillers left from his on-again, off-again spurts of severe shoulder pain, deducing from his tolerance level for this sort of medication over ten years that he could suffice with, oh, four prescription-strength painkillers. He knew that his liver probably resembled, for lack of better description, a bad knish pie, but given the ferocity of his pain attacks the future state of an organ he didn't even notice at the time was rather inconsequential. The fact that he was completely stoned out informed him, at the furthermost and oppressed logical center of his mind, that the dosage was far too high, even given his tolerance.

_If people could see Strategos Folken now… not such the terror anymore… just a pathetic, stoned-out man. _

The codeine in the medication was making him drowsy, he knew. He was already inhaling the pillow and drifting in and out of consciousness, in such a state that he was able to drift back into dreams knowing exactly where he was, and commence. 

_I need to see a doctor about this. The headaches should not be this bad this long after injury._

He was dreaming about the healers again. The ones from Fanelia, inspirations and the cardinal reason that he believed that women were innately much smarter than men. He did not know if he was dreaming so much as remembering, for the dream was so accurate and made so much sense that it could not possibly be a quilted fabrication of truths and ideas. Unless, of course, within the context of the dream and the drugs such a quilted fabrication would make perfect sense.

The pillow smoothed into the feeling of air, and he was outdoors once again—no, in a shack so open to the air that he felt as though he was out of doors—still feeling a splitting headache at the back of his mind. He was eleven years old, awkward, endowed with a feathery alto voice, and terrified of authority. He was laying face-up on the healers' bed, watching the dark-haired one—Mauva—prepare medicine and listening carefully to every word she spoke. He had a painful crush on her and her partner, Gerthide, though he was more attracted to Mauva's straightforward and loquacious style to contrast his own severe introversion. Gerthide was more like himself: quiet, brilliant, and timid.

"Glar leaves," Mauva said, turning around and pointing at him with a fat, seed-laden leaf in an almost scolding motion. "They relieve most forest-borne poisons. Remember the yellow markings along the pods. They look just like common peas but for those markings. You understand?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"And for the Goddess' sake, don't call me ma'am. It makes me feel like an old lady." She returned to her work. "Normal kids in your position would be feeling all superior and privileged and mindful of their stations, but you have to keep acting like it's your fault for being born more fortunate than the rest of us."

"…I don't understand."

"You wouldn't." Mauva turned around and offered Folken a handful of blackberries, which she ended up forcing upon him after he refused in a quiet voice a few times. She batted him on the head as he walked forward to accept the fruit. "And stand up straight. You're going to have lovely shoulders when you grow up; don't make them grow crooked. If you walk like that when you go though a growth spurt, it'll stick."

Folken sat bolt upright.

"That's much better. You're not at all conceited for walking with your head held high and your shoulders back to the rest of the world. Do you think people who stand up straight are conceited?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then why is it any different for you?"

"…" Folken shrugged and hunched over his berries. "Idunno…"

Mauva whacked him again. Folken sat up straight. 

"Speak up! Argh! ...You're the most precocious child I've ever dealt with. When you get older and experience life, you'll have things to say that everybody will want to hear. Trust me on this."

"Pre-what?"

"Precocious. It means you know too much for your age and you worry about stuff that shouldn't worry you until you're much older." 

"…oh."

"Come on, now, sit up straight. Feel some pride. I just called you a very smart boy. Compliments like that just make kids like you glow."

"No, I'm not that smart…" he whispered, inwardly telling himself that he was the most brilliant person in the world, tragically misunderstood and therefore thought to be slow.

Mauva whacked him over the head again.

"You know you're smart. Stop putting yourself down. It doesn't make you any better of a person to do that. Pride isn't conceit."

Folken was already glowing. He whispered a shy "Thank you," and occupied himself with organizing his berries by size, nudging them around the palm of his hand, until he heard an exacerbated sigh from Mauva and the swish of her skirt against the floor as she returned to her work. Only then did he dare to watch her shyly through his eyelashes.

The door of the healer's shack opened, pouring the setting sunlight over the herbs hung in the rafters. Gerthide edged into the room, holding the door with her backside and cradling a bundle of fuel. Folken crammed the remaining berries into his mouth and jumped off the bed, running over to relieve her of the fuel and carry it over to the fireplace.

"Thank you, darling—oh, thanks, yes…" Gerthide brushed the bark and splinters off of her skirt and smiled at her partner, who was now brushing her own hands on her apron and walking over to share a brief nuzzle of welcome while she thought that Folken was well occupied struggling with the bundle of fuel. Folken shoved the fuel into the iron, sled-shaped cradle and brushed the remnants of wood off of his clothes while he secretly—with some degree of guilt and excitement borne by viewing something forbidden—watched them kiss with a small, satisfied noise from Gerthide. Folken pretended to be very interested in the ties of his shirt. He knew that they were aware of his knowledge of the true nature of their relationship, and felt a great deal of pride in the fact that he was the only person from the palace they would possibly trust with any information regarding their personal life. Sodomy, witchcraft, forbidden books—all of the things they practiced and even taught to Folken in small amounts were capitol crimes against society and the security of the crown, punishable by burning. During Folken's lifetime, only one woman had received such a punishment, and his mother had staunchly refused to allow him to attend the execution. His father thought that it would make a man out of his timid son, but Varie won the argument in the end and Folken remained inside the palace with Van, drowning out the noise in the courtyard square with the noise of the kitchens. If Folken remembered correctly, her offence was supposed witchcraft for having a gift for befriending cats. He had always loved cats himself and as such liked to visit her to play with her friends, but the cats were soon thereafter slaughtered as assumed accomplices in her craft. He cried for a solid month. His father told him to get over it, but maintained a paternal concern behind his stony mask. Folken got the impression that his father did not relish the deed any more than his son, but that he believed it was essential in maintaining control of a good society. Goau Fanel was a gentle man, but, Folken thought, blinded by adherence to tradition. He had no faith in the inherent goodness of people, no matter how off they seemed.

The women broke from their embrace, and Folken abandoned his feigned interest in his clothing. The rest of the evening commenced as usual during his visits—talking to Gerthide and Mauva while Gerthide practiced her needlepoint and Mauva sketched by firelight, painfully aware of the fact that he had no chance in winning the affections of either lady. Even if either one was interested in men as well as women—he had asked, and Mauva was, while Gerthide was not—he knew that he had no chance as a suitor. Were he in Mauva's position, he would choose Gerthide over himself any day. He was a child, and knew that both of them were aware of his crush and thought it adorable. He was unconfident, timid, prone to mumbling, and clumsy as a foal, surely no competition for the grace of a fully-grown woman. It was through them that he found an avatar for his worship of the feminine side of the universe—through their seemingly endless knowledge, sense and sensibility, compassion only matched by his own mother, and lack of maliciousness—and through their guidance that he first learned about things that would fully capture his attention later in his life. 

They _seemed_ perfect for a long time, though Folken progressively became aware of the fact that they, like anybody else, could not possibly know everything. And as he came to know them more, he saw that even women were far from perfect—many of them displayed utter maliciousness of a level he thought only capable by men. He gained an awareness of the meaning behind secret, tense, smiling looks exchanged at parties and in meetings that were truly laced with venom and pure spite. Mauva was often downright rude to the townsladies, using insults that went right over their heads and that were spoken in such a sweet tone that few could detect their true nature, and Gerthide often spent evenings venting over the small-mindedness of so-and-so, and how so-and-so deserved to be hexed, and ho so-and-so was cheating on his wife and deserved to be castrated. There was a period of depression in which his romanticized view of women as perfect was modified to consider them, as part of all of humanity, flawed, and just as responsible for contributing bad karma to the universe as men. The obsession of his fairy-tale age of innocence, forcefully perpetuated by ideas spawned from the same precocious genius that would contribute to his acute awareness of the world, dwindled. The paradox was realized, and Folken's crush for the women took a more mature turn. They were no longer paragons, but amazing people.

Karma was an idea with which Folken had become enamored after Mauva's instruction in the esoteric beliefs of Freid—several nights of sitting through oral renditions of books she had memorized on a trip as a youth. He begged for more Freidian ideology and stories for nights until Mauva finally indulged him.

"Fine, fine!" she yelled, handing him a carmine book. "You want more? Fine, but don't read this until you become a fully-matured man! You won't understand the beauty until you become sexually mature."

Folken flushed red to the very tips of his ears. He was thirteen at the time, lanky, and just undergoing the first stages of puberty and learning that arousal involved more physical 'rising' than mere blood to his face. He dared not ask anybody about the subject, knowing already fully well the meaning of the slang terms 'pop a bone' and 'hard-on' from the soldiers and knowing equally well that they were considered somehow sinful and disgusting. He accepted the book and numbly registered the title to translate to _Scarlet_, mumbling his gratitude. Mauva tilted his chin up with the cool tips of her fingers and looked into his eyes.

"A-ha… I see…" Mauva slid her fingers out from under his chin; he kept his eyes on hers. "You have already started."

"I… I beg your pardon?"

"Started sexual maturity. You get stiff when you get aroused." (Folken turned crimson.) "Don't worry; it's perfectly normal and healthy. It is nothing dirty or shameful, no matter what those dolts at the palace preach about celibacy and purity. It's actually quite a beautiful thing."

Folken was having a difficult time seeing how popping a boner could be considered beautiful thing, but Mauva assured him that he would understand with time, an answer he utterly loathed, which, in turn, Mauva assured him that he would come to hate less with time and would someday say to people younger than himself. It was no insult of his intelligence, she assured, but the mere fact that no amount of intelligence could emulate experience. 

Folken still felt insulted. Mauva laughed at him and told him to go ahead and read the book.

Folken returned to his room with the carmine-bound book, his pulse quickening with the thrill of having something forbidden and secret tucked under his arm, something mysterious and dangerous and so _rebellious_, and began to read it under his covers by candlelight, creating a tent with his sheets over his head and holding the book propped against his legs and the candle in the other hand. 

He learned very quickly just what the purpose behind the growing hard nonsense was. It was mechanically necessary for the activities outlined in the book to commence. He slammed the book closed upon reaching the first illustration, half-thinking that the sheets close around him were going to catch fire from the heat rising into his face. 

_Oh… my… god… _

So, this was exactly what adults meant when they spoke of 'copulating' or 'sealing a marriage', though he had gained the impression that marriage was often a secondary concern to the act itself when people actually enjoyed it. Granted, as he learned within about four pages, 'coitus' was not the only method of sexual union—though it was the only respectable one according to society, and the book certainly did not feel obligated to only advocate respectable activity. He had very little doubt that the acts outlined in further detail later in the book would be thought rather obscene.

_Well, yeah, the whole damn thing is obscene. It's weird. It's gross. It's—holy God, they're not—_(flip the page, jerk head up, grow red, look back down at new page_)—it's weird. Completely messy, disgusting, violating, enthralling… are those people in pain? Their faces are_ _screwed up so—oh god damn it, not now!_

Folken crossed his legs in an attempt to get himself to flatten back out, but the applied pressure, he registered with a mixture of disgusted guilt and shocked pleasure, made the arousal even worse. He gasped and froze. He wanted to rub harder and more persistently, but it felt so wrong and dirty, somehow revealing, as if the entire palace were tuned into every move he made to bring himself more pleasure and would soon come knocking at his door. He blinked and focused on the tent—solid, white sheets, closed room—and assured himself that he was completely alone and that not a soul would have an idea. 

Feeling somewhat better and enthralled with the mixture of danger and arousal, he flipped through the illustrations, not bothering to read the text at the moment, wondering what it felt like to do _that_ and be touched like _this_, wondering how something so dirty and obscene could possibly be as wonderful as the people in the book seemed to make it, carefully scrutinizing (and this made him feel even more dirty and as though he were violating every member of the opposite gender in some manner, Mauva and Gerthide being foremost in his mind) the finer points of the female anatomy with which he had never been acquainted. 

_Hell, I'm seeing several points of the _male_ anatomy I wasn't aware of before._ He flipped the page and pushed up the sheet to get fresh air and check the small water-clock by his bed. The sun would be up in about two hours.

_The entire night gone already…_

Folken swallowed and took a deep breath. He felt numb and at the moment, still fully-self aware, but he had a feeling that as of tomorrow morning, when he had to go and join the rest of society, he would feel in some way changed, in some way that he could not fathom, isolated. He did not know whether to call it 'guilt' or 'awareness', but neither definition seemed to perfectly encompass the impending condition. He was tempted to call it 'detachment'.

_So, all of the stuff in here is involving men and women together so far— _Folken looked up, growing once again red. He absently stroked his erection, long past the point of feeling self-conscious about it so long as he was absolutely alone. It was a familiarity that would vanish less than two years later when his body would be maimed. _What about what Mauva and Gerthide--?_

Folken grew guiltily still and swallowed. _No, no, I am _not_ going to fantasize about them. I am _not _going to look through the book for women doing what…they must do and place their faces with the bodies. I will not do that to them. It's completely disrespectful. No. No. No._

Folken was fingering the next page as he thought this. Less than a minute later, he was flipping through the illustrations searching for the lesbian intercourse, berating himself the entire time.

_This is just for education—it isn't them, every example isn't them—but you would like it to be, wouldn't you, you sick fuck—NO—just looking; it's line art; I'm just curious, becoming well-educated—it can't be horrible and forbidden if two people like Mauva and Gerthide do it and love each other so much—everybody must be mistaken—it must be just like everything else, just that sick and weird and obscene and--_

Folken stopped on the first page of homoerotica. It involved not two women, but two men.

_Uh… huh… well…_

The erection was not lessening. Folken stopped himself from turning the page and regarded the picture carefully. Two men together was not something he had spent much energy fathoming, though upon looking at the picture he realized immediately how they adjusted their intercourse to the mechanics of their bodies_—using—_that _opening—oh—how—disgusting—_one sitting in his partner's lap, cradled, but it looked as though they were still finding the experience thoroughly pleasurable. Folken was tempted to turn the page and wish the subjects good luck and godspeed in attaining whatever it was they wanted out of that business, but he was captivated by the picture.

It was arousing him as much as the pictures of heterosexual couples.

He remembered clearly the several speeches he had heard about the dangers involved in two men feeling too strongly for one another—many of these speeches being made to him by soldiers who thought that he spent too much time inside reading—and all such allocations being alleviated by his father. Goau assured his men that pursuits of the mind made nobody any less a man then the next one, and that his son was fully as much a man as any of them.

Part of Folken's gut rebelled in guilt. _Well, yeah, as much a _man_, but this is two _men_, they're liking the fact that they're both _men_, right? Oh god, I'm a fairy. Oh god, oh god, oh god… Is this really turning me on, or… what? What's going on? Does this make me a fairy? I'm gay. No, I'm not gay. I was attracted to _women_. I'm attracted to both of them? When I was looking at the men and the women together, were the men turning me on as much as the women?_

Folken was looking into space, terrified to look back at the book. Homosexuality was a horrible sin, but nobody ever spoke of bisexuality. In some way, it seemed even more lewd and loose, as if it were so utterly sinful and shameful that it needed not even be given public awareness. 

_Stop that. Stop that this instant. Mauva likes men as much as women, and you know from them that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this sort of thing. Is there? I mean, you're completely fine with women doing that, because they're—well, they're women, it's different—but two men? Is that as much all right? It seems very… disgusting… the ass stuff just…oh god, I'm a pervert. I'm a pervert. I'm going to end up in gutters screwing around with drunks._

Folken shook his head firmly and stared at the picture once again, willing himself to snap out of it. When registering the picture as mere lines, after the initial absorption, he could block out any feelings of arousal. His erection was beginning to collapse with self-disgust. He knew that as soon as he started allowing himself to feel so, he would get aroused again. He slammed the book closed, hid it under his pillow, and fell into an uneasy drowse that could not be called proper sleep.

The next morning, as soon as the sun rose, he ran to the healers' shack, sure that everybody who saw him would instantly point at him and scream "FAGGOT!" or "PERVERT!" Mauva was already awake and preparing breakfast aside herbal bags, while Gerthide, Folken was told, had been attending a woman who had recently delivered a colicky baby. Folken was glad for this; the conversation he wanted to have could not involve Gerthide. She didn't understand. She wasn't like _him_. She wasn't so completely off base that even the taboo of homosexuality failed to mention her.

"All right, son, spill it." Mauva pulled a pancake off of an upturned iron and slapped it onto a plate, then slid it across the table to Folken. "You know where syrup and butter are. Now, what's on your mind? Read that book, I assume. I can read it all over you. Hah, read? Get it?"

_Oh, great, she can tell, they can all tell, it's probably scrawled all over my face._

"Um… yeah." Folken set the plate on the edge of the table, yet without an appetite, and moved over to the bed. "Um… yeah. Hi. Good morn?"

"Good morn, 'ken. Don't give me that 'I've lost my appetite' nonsense. You're a growing boy; you have to be hungry. Eat up."

"I… uh… diet. Hi. Um… yeah."

"Don't start that again." Mauva set her current herbal bag on the table and sat next to Folken, spreading her skirts underneath her. "I thought I beat that mumbling nonsense out of you already. You're too damn skinny as it is. If you're going to grow to your full height—which, as I have already told you time and again, is going to be beautifully abnormal—you had better eat up."

_I'm going to be short the rest of my life. Shut up._ "I… I really need to talk to you about something."

 "Ah-ha." Mauva nodded. "You read the book."

"Well… yeah. And… urm…"

"Discover some stuff your parents would never tell you about, I wager."

"Well, yeah. I mean, no. I mean…" Folken scratched the back of his neck. "Actually, I've never talked to my parents about this sort of thing. I mean, they don't even know that I'm… you know… doing that thing. You know. Um… getting aroused."

"Oh, I'm sure they've guessed. You're of the right age. Your father will probably come and talk to you about it very soon if he hasn't already."

"He hasn't. It's a really dirty thing."

"Naw, not at all. How do you think you got here?"

"…MAUVA."

"Well, it's the truth." (Folken was turning red.) "Yeah, your parents had sex, probably several, several times, probably still do—"

"Could we _please_ not talk about that? That's not why I'm here. I mean…"

"You're not here to talk about sex?"

"Yes! I mean, not with my parents—god, no—I mean—no—I'm—well—"

"You masturbated and you feel guilty about it?"

"Yes! I mean—that's not the whole thing—it's—well, that's like, touching yourself, right? Because it feels good?"

"Yes, that would be what masturbation is, and it's completely healthy and normal. Did you completely get off?"

"Yeah,  no—I _beg_ your pardon?"

"Did you have an orgasm?"

"Did I—NO!" Folken half jumped up, thought better of it, and sat back down. "I—well, I almost—I couldn't, you see, because…"

"Oh, is that what the problem is? You think you're impotent at thirteen? I can assure you that the plumbing might be wacky for a while—"

"NO! That's not it! Argh!" Folken buried his head in his hands. "I didn't get to that point because I felt guilty and disgusted because I was looking at pictures of men and it was getting me off, all right? The—it—just collapsed. All right? The plumbing—the stuff is fine."

"…ah. I see." Mauva started laughing. Folken looked up indignantly. "No, no, it's not you; no wonder you felt so bad. The idiots up at the palace treat homosexuality as if it is completely dirty and shameful."

"I am _not_ homosexual! I—I was getting off of both women and men, all right? I go both ways."

"…ah. Is that all?"

"Is that all? I'm—I'm a two-wayer, all right? It's even worse than going just one way or the other. It means I'll sleep with anything that moves."

"Now, that is just nonsense." Mauva draped her arm around Folken's shoulders. "I've heard that rumor too. It's a very common myth. It—well—its basis in fact, you see, lies in the fact that many bisexuals are extremely promiscuous. So are many homosexuals. Stereotypes have a basis in fact, I am sorry to say. It's part of the culture. I often wonder if it is more of a self-fulfilled prophesy on the part of those who fulfill that stereotype or not, but I see no reason that it should apply to everybody. It most certainly does not, in fact. I am bisexual myself."

"I know, and that's why I'm talking to you. It—well, it seems even worse than being homosexual, right? People don't even talk about bisexuality."

"I beg your pardon? Are you insulting me?"

"NO! I mean—well, I know that since you're—that way—it can't be that bad. I mean… well, if somebody like you is that way, it can't mean everybody who is that way is bad."

"It doesn't make anybody bad on that basis alone. But thank you. Yes, true bisexuality is extremely rare." Mauva stood and began to prepare tea. "There is some truth in that. Most people do go one way or the other. Especially men. Bisexual men are very rare. If you were a woman, I would suspect that you might be just confused—it is very common for young, heterosexual women to be mildly attracted to other women when they are young; some of them fear men and are attracted to strong women as a proxy—but not so for men."

"But if you're attracted to a gender at all—no matter how they act socially, I mean—doesn't it mean that you have that sexual orientation? I mean, straight men are absolutely not attracted to feminine men, are they?"

"Women are a little bit different. It is difficult to explain. Here." Mauva offered Folken a saucer of tea and resumed her seat beside him with her own saucer. "Yes, the absolute line is physical gender, regardless of social action, cross-dressing, whatever—but those heterosexual women soon come to realize that they cannot love other women, regardless, and the women who are lesbians or bisexual can. For some reason, heterosexual guys aren't the same way with feminine men."

"…" Folken sipped his tea. "So you think I really am a fairy?"

"Pst. I never said anything of the sort. You are quite possibly a bisexual man. Sexual orientation doesn't determine your sexual identity at all. You see, you're seeing everything in terms of attraction between feminine and masculine. You know what I mean? Gay men are very aware of the fact that they are men, and love people who are the same. Some lesbians are the most feminine women I have ever met, and love the same. Gerthide isn't butch, is she? I mean, yeah, there are some who sort of take on the opposite gender role—that's the butch / fairy thing, and some are attracted to people who are that way, and it's _fine_—but that is definitely not always the case."

"But you said that stereotypes have basis in fact."

"They do. They are not absolute truths, just generalizations. There are many bisexual and gay men who are what you consider a 'fairy'. And even then, being effeminate isn't a bad or shameful thing at all. Some of the sweetest people I have met are complete flamers. And it most certainly does not make them any less strong than a masculine man. Femininity is paraded as the side of 'weakness' to masculine 'strength', but you know what I think about that."

"You think it's nonsense. But they—I mean, fairies—sleep with everybody."

"Most do. Not all. Some are saving themselves for their special someones. You see, I think men are more likely to get into trouble sleeping around with one another than women. They're naturally more likely to want sex, and if you have two men together—who think about sex all the time anyway—there is no sensible woman there to say 'Stop thinking with your dick; we are not having a one-night stand.' Men naturally want to spread seed. Actually, now that I think about it, some women are just as bad."

"…um. Thanks."

"I never said _you_. Goddess." Mauva started laughing. "You've got too much of a head on your shoulders. I'm explaining in terms of most people. When I say that most people grow up and become mundane and superstitious peasants, it applies in the same way that I make generalizations here. Not everybody, but most. You're not most people, 'ken."

"Well, thank you for that."

"You're welcome."

"So… this is perfectly natural."

"Well, it's perfectly natural in the way that it is natural for somebody to like reading or hunting. Not everybody likes it, but it is perfectly natural for that person. Other people might not understand it and would never be able to love it, but people respect each other's interests for the most part. Readin' ain't any less natural than anything else just because only a few people enjoy it."

"Well, ask almost anybody at the palace. They seem to think it's a dangerous pastime."

"Well, there you go. Prosecution rests. Don't take advice from most people." 

"And I would say that this is a little bit more dangerous and rare than enjoying reading. And reading you can learn to love, but this… you can't really make yourself go one way or another, can you? It's not a choice, is it?"

"Some people try to make it one, but no. I've known many a gay man who has felt utterly disgusted with himself and has tried to go straight, but he just can't force it. Same way, a lot of artists try to force themselves into bisexuality to feel open-minded and different—it's sort of a counter-culture phenomenon in the art schools in Astoria; shocking how different the world outside this little country can be—but many of them are actually straight. Yes, I guess hobbies were sort of a bad example, but then again, some people can learn to love reading and others can't, no matter if they get the same amount of exposure, and some people only become aware of their sexualities when exposed to things that make them respond. Anyway, there isn't a thing dangerous about it. And yes, it is considerably rarer than enjoying reading." Mauva scratched Folken's back half-consciously. "We're a rarity of the rare, Folken. We swing both ways, but we are not promiscuous—well, I have no way of knowing, but I have a feeling that you just are not. And that reminds me of the potential dangers we _should_ discuss."

"Oh… great."

"If you end up with a boyfriend someday—obviously, he's going to either be gay or bisexual like yourself—and he has been sleeping around a lot, there is a good chance that he will have illnesses that only spread with intimate contact. Because of that promiscuity stereotype—well, yeah, true for the masses of the minority, so to speak—you're in a spot of danger."

"I know."

"And the second thing… well, it's not really a danger, but it can be a tragedy." Mauva folded her hands in her lap and slackened her shoulders. "…do you want children?"

Folken shook his head. Mauva sighed. "Well, yeah, you're thirteen. You're not supposed to want kids for years yet. If you end up with another man as your life companion, you two will be unable to have children of your own. That is the one cardinal sacrifice homosexual couples make. It's the true sacrifice—not social rejection, not social danger—but the one misfortune that is not brought on by the hate and ignorance of others."

Mauva was weakly brushing her hair back behind her ears with a forlorn expression. Folken nodded.

"You wanted children, didn't you?"

"It was the reason I debated spending my life with another woman. But in the end, I just loved Gerthide too much." Mauva gave Folken a sad smile. "I don't regret my decision, but it saddens me. I wish there were a way for us to have children. I have to suffice with watching others' children grow around me."

"I am sure your and Gerthide's children would be lovely."

"Thank you. But, ah, enough of that." Mauva waved her hands. "What's done is done, and I'm plenty happy with all I have right now. So, do you feel any better? Want more tea?"

"Yes, please. I'll get it." Folken walked over to the table and found the teapot. "So, I'm not doomed to spend the rest of my life hanging on streetcorners in women's clothing catering to sailors in Astoria?"

"Unless you want to be one of the sailors."

"Oh, such a life decision. That alleviates all of my fears." Folken turned around and offered Mauva more tea, which she accepted. He was smiling. "Here. Maybe I'll end up a transvestite someday. I don't see any problem with it."

"No, you'll have the completely wrong body shape. You're going to be unquestionably masculine." Mauva sipped. "I don't like cross-dressing men who aren't androgynous. It just looks terrible. Either have a womanly body shape and make yourself look decent, or don't. Though, I have no problem with any man who chooses to wear makeup."

"…you're serious?"

"I'm serious. Personality androgyny is fine no matter what you look like, but fashion sense never hurt anybody."

"I think I'm pretty much a guy."

"No, you're far too sensible."

"…hey."

"I'm serious." Mauva smiled. "So, future sailor, do you have any other plans for your future that don't involve behaving stereotypically? Oh, yeah, aren't you going to become king or something?"

"Not for long." Folken replaced the teapot and sat back down. "Assuming that I ever to take the wretched office, I am going to abolish the monarchy and set up a representative government."

"…" Mauva took a sip. "You're going to what?"

"Oh, come on. Don't tell me you cotton that divine right nonsense."

"Of course not, but I am not sure that I understand what you mean."

"Oh, it's great!" Folken sat on the edge of the bed, set the saucer on the floor, and made illustrating movements with his hands. "You see, I read about it in some old manuscripts translated from Mystic Moon documents—hidden up in the library—and it's great! It's just great! You see, instead of having a royal family and the eldest son becoming king, you don't even have a royal family and—well, start from the beginning. Assume that there is no royal family."

Mauva thought about this for a moment. "…everybody owns everything?"

"Yes, no, well, no. Not exactly. The leaders are elected. People vote for who runs the country, but you see, even that leader isn't the absolute leader, he's sort of like a commander—"

"And what if he is a she?"

"—she as well, sorry. Anyway, he or she is just like a commander, and there's a senate and a congress and these checks and balances so nobody has absolute power, and it's run by the people and—well, it means that the country is run by somebody who isn't me, somebody who runs for the office and wants to be there, and I'm free to do whatever I want."

"So this is just your method of getting out of being king?"

"Well… yeah, but it'll also be the best for the country in the long run, so everybody wins. I wouldn't do it if I thought it was going to hurt the country. If you get a bad leader you can knock him out of power, and everybody is equal under law—we'll have no more class nonsense—and the people will be happier."

Mauva took a long drink of tea and set the cup on her saucer, staring at Folken. "You read of this?"

"Yes."

"From Mystic Moon documents."

"They're sort of old, but yeah. The empires fell, sooner or later, but I think that I could make it work. I've worked some bugs out of it."

"And you, young man, think you can save the world."

"I'm thirteen. I've seen a lot."

"Right." Mauva smiled. "And you think these people will drop their sacred traditions at the drop of a hat? They'll just accept the destruction of their society?"

"I'll be king, won't I? They'll have to do as I say. It'll all work out. And then I'll travel the world. I'll finally be free from this place, and I'll see everything. My family has money; I can bum a little off of them." Folken grasped Mauva's hands, nearly knocking the tea off of her legs. "I'll take you and Gerthide and Van, if you all want. We'll go to Astoria, and Freid, and the Islands of Bern, and Zaibach—there's so much happening in Zaibach, travelers tell me, and I really want to see it—and I'll enter a university after I'm done traveling and do something grand with my life. Van can do whatever he wants, and you and Mauva can settle down anywhere in the world. I'll come visit you. I'll buy an airship or use Escaflowne to travel all over the world. We can even look for the Mystic Valley or the Ruins of Genova, if you want."

"Drunk with youth and freedom, I see."

"What?"

"Nothing." Mauva lowered their clasped hands. "It sounds grand, Folken. I would love more than anything to go with you. Just don't expect the path to establishing your new country to be easy. Tradition is against you."

"Psh." Folken made the motions Mauva usually made with that comment. "A lot of things are impossible until somebody does them. I'll do it. It'll all work out. The world will be better for it, and everybody will be happy that way. Maybe every country will copy us and the whole world will be happy. Humans would be able to forge their own fates."

"If only." Mauva sighed. "Monarchs aren't so willing to give up the power that makes them better than everybody else."

"But they're not better! They were just born into a certain family—"

"Yeah, well, tell them that, and everybody else that grew up loving divine right. The idea that there is something holy to idolize on Gaea." Mauva sighed again as Folken's face fell. "Don't worry about it. You'll do something grand and be happy, son. It'll all work out. If anybody is going to fix this country, you will be the one to do it. I think fate did intervene in having you be the first-born Fanel son. You're going to make everything better."

"…you really think that?"

"I truly do, Folken. You're a brilliant kid. You're also a little off." Mauva ruffled his hair. "It's what the world needs. You were born to balance out the stagnation of tradition in the world. It's time to do some things because they make sense."

"Oh… all right." Folken was beaming. He stood up and looked out the window. "Wow, already midday. I'm sorry to have taken so much of your time."

"No, it was a good talk. I'm glad that you came to talk to me." Mauva stood up and gathered the teacups. "I—no, I do not need help, before you ask—hope that you feel better about your new self-awareness now?"

"Oh, yes, much. I'll just have to keep it under wraps."

"Close wraps. Your father would flip on you if he knew. And who knows, you might end up being a straight man after all. You'll know for sure soon. Teenagers are perpetually confused about everything until they turn about twenty-eight."

"Yes, well… all right." Folken gave an awkward half-bow and waved. "Thank you so much once again."

---------------------

_And it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to,_

_It didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?  
_Folken grasped his pillow until it ripped under his claws, still face-down in his bed and inhaling cotton and feathers sharply in a half-feverish, half-sleeping state of recollection.__

Somebody found out. Somebody finally got them. They were burned alive.

_Well, it's not any better than what you did to the citizens of your own homeland, is it? _Folken ran his fingers down his face. _Go ahead. Justify yourself by saying that it was out of genuine compassion for all of humanity. Tell that to the people who died. See what they say, you bastard. Some of them are probably still suffering in wretched conditions as you lie here and mope about a small concussion._

"HEY-A-LOOO----ZAIBACH!"

_What the HELL?_

Folken jerked up. The speakers in the hallway were whining and sputtering shots of static as the speaker cleared his throat, momentarily lost his grip on the button causing an abrupt silence, and then resumed his occupation of the frequency.

"Ah, that's better! How are you all doing tonight? Hey, can you all hear me? Good! That's good, because you're all going to die! Do you hear me? YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!"

_Oh shit. OH SHIT._

Folken sat up and blindly groped for his shoes underneath the bed, bent at an awkward angle, half-listening to the noise in the hallway and half searching the floor out of the corners of his eyes. He gave up and dropped to his knees, wincing at a pain that shot through his skull and nursing it while he found his boots and yanked them on with one hand.

_Socks… forget it. Forget it. Just go. _

"I'm Johnny C, but you all can call me JOHNNY! If I really like you, I'll allow you to call me Nny, but I don't think it's going to matter much when you are all DEAD. Yes, YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, you small-minded haxxor rectal tics, robotic soldier killing-machines, ASSHOLE COMMANDERS. A-HA! WEEEE! I think I'll find a better weapon. Excuse me for a moment."

Folken was already out the door and yanking his cloak around his shoulders by this time, stumbling down the hallway and smoothing his hair back with his free hand after slamming his door and taking the time to lock it. The whining static died abruptly with a final screech, and the hallway was once again silent but for the rushing footfalls and the slamming open of doors around corners. People were emerging in confusion.

"Strategos," asked the first soldier in the hallway, "What is—"

The intercom cracked on once again. "I can't call it much of an honor to talk to you all this evening—"

Folken brushed past the soldiers and strode toward the laboratory, listening to the intercom the entire time and nursing his head, the latter of which was protesting such sudden turbulence and rising. 

"—but you might say that this is the last conversation you will ever have in your life, some of you, Depends on how far away I am. But isn't human contact just a bitch? It would be kinder for me to shut up and leave you to solitude, BUT I WON'T. Hey, you know what I've learned about people during my delightful visit to your floating hellhole? THEY SUCK NO MATTER WHERE YOU ARE! Oh, yeah, by the way, Commander Albino Dildo, you're first."

_Commander WHAT? Dildo—Dilandau?_

"Do you know why? BECAUSE YOU ARE A VIOLENT, INSECURE—"

"Folken!" Foruma yelled down the hall.

"—SHALLOW WASTE OF ORGANIC MATTER—"

Folken stopped in front of the older man, lowering his hand and standing up straight. Foruma was drawn with wracking stress, chalk-white, and obviously not amused.

"—FOR WHOSE DEATH THE WORLD WILL REJOICE! I am doing a public service here!"

"Garufo is dead," said Foruma.

"…what?"

"So, wh~oo among you will be spa~ared? Do you know? Do you know? I know! NOBODY! HA! Because I HATE ALL OF YOU!"

"The prisoner has escaped," Foruma said acidly. "Garufo was found impaled and mangled in the lavatory adjacent to your lab. There were two domestic guards found murdered in the same fashion outside the laboratory door."

_Garufo… what the hell was he doing in the laboratory in the first place? Oh, he betrayed my trust, great. Now this has happened._

"This is all your fault, Strategos Folken."

"HEY, I heard a great joke! Jesus Christ walks into an inn holding three nails—"

"…I was not the one who broke into the laboratory and destroyed the mechanisms of defense installed therein, Sorcerer."

"—and he says, 'Can you put me up for the night?' WOOOHA! I love that one! …Oh, come on, haven't you seen _The Crow_?"

"But this ship," Foruma hissed, "is under your jurisdiction. Did you not say that you wanted full responsibility for the prisoner?"  
Folken gave Foruma a wan look. _Yeah, sure, whatever, I always shoulder every responsibility that comes my way. Why not this? The only one of you bastards I could stand is now dead—he was a decent man, damn it—and now this. Now all of this. Was it not a member of your organization who set the prisoner free in the first place? Aren't you trespassing on my territory? And then you venture to call it my fault—_

"OH COME ON, GIVE ME A BREAK! I'M JUST AN ARTIST TRYING TO BE BRILLIANT HERE!"

"We KNOW!" Foruma barked at the speakers. He turned back to Folken and removed his glasses, cleaning them on the hem of his robe, nervous beneath the calm pallor. He sighed. "Well, Strategos, do something about this mess. We are returning to the capitol immediately to bury the body of Hain Garufo and house the prisoner in our main facilities."

"…you first presume to place full responsibility of the ship in my hands, and then reap the benefits of my position while you leave me to deal with—"

"ARGH, STOP TALKING! SO MUCH BLITHERING EXCESS! EXCESS! RAMBLING AND RAMBLING AND—argh—egh—"

The intercom squealed off. Foruma replaced his glasses over his eyes and stared at Folken.

"The law requires that you return to the capitol given the circumstances. Don't place yourself in more jeopardy than you already harbor. Just do what I tell you, for once."


End file.
